2 - to grace
A life update?? I guess??
Hey!
Writing this to you after getting off a Facetime where you (kind of) helped me troubleshoot getting Substack working. As you so eloquently put it, it was a “when you call your mom and everything magically works” moment. All is well now.
Thank you for starting this letter writing thing, I’ve been meaning to get into Substack writing for a while and while there are a million reasons to hold off on putting things into the world, you starting this made it that much easier. Here I am!
Time for some rapid-fire life updates (out of order):
Started school in Waterloo! Things are off to a bit of a slow start but it’s been nice because I’ve had time to adjust to being consistently on campus for the first time in my entire university career.
Plot twist!! Being in person was nice, but short-lived. After only 5 days we’re moving back to online learning due to a Covid outbreak in my cohort (luckily I was spared), but hopefully the restrictions will lift in a week or so.
Tried out for competitive hockey in Kitchener and made the team! Hockey was a huge part of my life growing up and I’ll be playing with tons of the same girls I played with in high school. Choosing to make time in my life for this feels like coming home. I know that having hockey as a consistent presence throughout the term will keep me grounded and that makes me feel extremely peaceful and resilient.
Ran a UW Startups event. Attendance was awesome, we hosted it at Catalyst137 in Kitchener and were so fortunate to get the support of great local tech people to make the event possible. So excited to see where the term takes us and how this evolves over while I’m at Waterloo and beyond. I really really really love community building and feel so beyond lucky that I get to meet so many amazing people while I’m at it.
Went to TIFF (the Toronto International Film Festival)! Watched some cool movies and met the producers/directors/actors after. Manifesting a career in media & got some pictures of Anson on the red carpet.
Have been hanging out with my parents a lot this week. Spending time with them is awesome, even when all we’re doing is sitting on the couch. My dad keeps making delicious dinners, and I’ve been sneaking into the kitchen late at night to devour all the leftovers due to my hockey-induced appetite. I’ve been overwhelmingly filled with gratitude that because they live close I’m able to easily do things that make me happy (including running events where I can steal all the costumes from our basement for the photo booth or driving to hockey games). They’ve also been going above and beyond to support my friends by doing grocery delivery to those with covid and housing people during Hack the North. I keep thanking them profusely (to the point where they’re laughing at me) but genuinely could not be in the place I am without their support.
In other news, this week I was dealing with some feelings and frustrations and sat down and wrote them all out. This has been my long-term coping mechanism for working through things, a form of self-therapizing. A framework my mom learned and passed down is “okay” (acknowledge all the details about your current situation), “but what do I want” (be explicit about where you’d like to be) and then “and how am I going to get there” (self-explanatory, connect the dots). Even a loosely structured feelings dump has a way of making my feelings a lot more manageable — the one I wrote the other day ended with this:
I forgot how effective writing out feelings can be. I love that it’s without feedback, without regret, and without an audience. The ability to write and re-write until it sits right. I love how once I’m done writing I often no longer feel how I did when I started, how I re-read the words I wrote 20 minutes ago and it feels like the inner workings of the mind of a (much pettier) stranger. Thoughts I no longer want to marinate, plucked one by one out of the swirling stew of my brain, leftover feelings evaporating in succession, residual resentment dissipating into the air and swept away by the lighthearted breeze of all the goodness that is to come. The world is so big, the past is so small. The murky night is left behind, the entire landscape in front of me is beginning to glow with potential. The sun is rising.
Writing to myself almost always ultimately converges into some form of a weirdly large-worded and poetic inspirational speech, but it’s really effective at pulling me out of my funk.
We are so much more in control of our feelings than we give ourselves credit for. Control doesn’t mean suppressing or shutting them down, but feeling them actively, admitting them to yourself and forgiving yourself for having them, and ultimately working through them until they cease to exist. The objective is to spend fewer life-hours mad.
Anyways this has been what’s on my mind for the last few days, it was great to see your face and hear your voice when we called. Hope SF is treating you well, and slightly jealous that you’ve landed yourself such fantastic roommates. Looking forward to seeing you (and all of them) again (whenever I do).
Warmly (see what I did there! :D),
Joss :)