Time moves forward in a spiral and allows us to revisit the lessons we have not quite mastered to improve upon them, or perhaps decide to discard them. Sometimes, we have not learned everything we think we did. Sometimes, we learned the wrong things and need to relearn the correct ones. Other times, giving up is the right choice. In this case, I choose mastery over disintegration.
I almost let this domain expire. I waited until the last day — today — to save it before it would have been thrown back to the domain registry gods. I am thankful I did this for a few reasons. One, I have come to understand and accept that this very site is one of the most authentic slices of me that exists, and to let it go would be self-censorship and self-erasure of the highest order, and this is not the time for that. Secondly, there are drafts saved here from the last five years that I never posted because I was dealing with the effects of traumatic brain injuries sustained in 2019 and 2020, and not quite sure when or where I was. These injuries are the primary reason for the long pause between entries. I am now a bit past five years post-injury, and this horrible, painful, and frightening experience has given me a lot of insight into the nature of consciousness, the brain, the medical system, and myself.
Right now, I am in the middle of rehabilitating my academic skills. I have begun pursuit of an associate’s degree in physical sciences and am in the finals week of my first class. I have chosen this degree to fill in the gaps in my education that were denied to me growing up because of a hostile anti-science pseudo-religious environment that traumatized and belittled me for wanting to study science and math, claiming they were “the work of the devil,” and teaching such absurd ideas like dinosaurs were a fabrication created by devil-worshipping evolutionists and the insistence that the earth was only 5,000 years old. I have also decided to study physical sciences because I have been trying to study them my entire life and have been continually interrupted or sabotaged by people around me. The sabotage was so severe that I was not allowed to attend high school in an attempt to prevent me from learning about evolution. I am done carrying these pains, and refuse to center myself and take any responsibility for things that were not in my control as a teenager. I have punished myself enough and it’s okay to let that go now.
Appropriately, I chose Anthropology 151, Emerging Humanity, as the first class to get back in the habit of higher education. At long last, I can now proudly say that I have formally studied the origins of the human species and have been able to correct my views on many things, gaining new perspectives I would not be able to have otherwise. I was surprised to learn that some of the human species preceding Homo sapiens were not discovered until after I had graduated from high school in 2003, which means that I would not have been able to learn about all of humanity’s origins had I been given a proper scientific education in the first place. This has been somewhat of a balm to my soul, as I have carried an immense amount of shame and intellectual inferiority over not having learned these things, and yet, it seems that, perhaps there is a greater reason my education has happened this way. I am still learning how to have grace over this.
I also am heavily focusing on rehabilitating my writing skills and realizing that I need a container to write more freely and share my thoughts about what I am experiencing at school. This was a dream of mine when I was locked away as a teenager, prevented from attending school or even really socializing at all outside of an unhealthy religious environment, spending all my time online, teaching myself HTML and CSS, building websites, writing in online diaries before the word blog was ever invented, learning graphic design on Photoshop with a pirated copy — an act of teenage desperation for which I have compensated by paying for Adobe Creative Cloud for nearly a decade now. I would read the online diaries of college students in dorms, taking photographs and studying and having wisdom teeth pulled and exploring new cities, and dream that I could one day be like them. I have been flailing and running from harm for so long and bending myself around things I never should have had to tolerate that the pleasant experience of attaining my first degree was ripped away from me.
While I am thankful for the psychology degree I earned, it was not what I initially set out to do, having started as a pre-medical student, wanting to study neuroscience and the biological bases of consciousness, hoping specifically to understand neurological disorders that affect speech, such as strokes, Parkinson’s, and muscular dystrophy. When I proceeded onto graduate school in health policy and law, having been disillusioned by western medicine, I moved to Delhi, India, and intended to focus on cross-cultural analysis of western and eastern medical systems. I was set up with a comfortable flat in South East Delhi, with lovely home cooked tiffin meals delivered for lunch and dinner, ready to take on the full load of a master’s program and make contacts in the public health system there. However, I made the bad decision to return home based on untruthful information, and walked right into a hostile environment full of emotional landmines which, despite my best efforts at peacekeeping and compromise, quickly eroded my confidence and hurt me greatly.
The social safety nets I thought I had around me suddenly eroded, and the loss of this support hurt so much that I internalized all the pain and left the program in the winter of 2019, despite having a 4.0 GPA. I was preparing to start a new master’s program in psychology in the winter of 2020 to try to move forward with my life when the accident of fall 2019 occurred, wherein I was rear-ended at a high speed on the freeway by a distracted driver who did not see me stopping to avoid a car which had suddenly stopped in front of me, leaving my car totaled, and me with a traumatic brain injury, along with injuries to my neck and leg. Four months later, a freak accident as a passenger on the bus — getting knocked down when a car ran a stop sign in front of the bus sent me flying head and arm first into a metal railing and knocking me unconscious as the bus slammed its brakes, being woken up to the bus driver repeatedly hitting me in the head with the bus door and people shouting to be let off the bus — left me with a second traumatic brain injury, fractured ribs, a painful dent in my left arm which persists to this day, and stole my ability to speak, write, sleep, play piano, and balance fluently, among a myriad of other socioeconomic and physical injuries, for a long time.
A mere month later, the day after my birthday, the SARS-CoV-2 quarantine began.
I would not find out until years later that I had been millimeters from being paralyzed from the neck down, and was lucky to just suffer what is likely permanent nerve damage into my arm and fingers. Indeed, I am lucky to even be alive today, as suffering a second traumatic brain injury while still in recovery from the first can be fatal. During the worst of the past five years, I questioned many times if I was actually alive at all, or if I had been thrown into an afterlife, certainly exacerbated by the bizarre global events of and societal responses to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which directly affected my access to receiving appropriate medical attention. Slowly, but surely, mostly on my own relying on the knowledge obtained from earning my psychology degree, the Brainline website, a few traumatic brain injury survivor support groups, and reading as much of the current research on brain injury as I could manage, I rehabilitated my ability to speak, write, see, hear, cook, eat, walk, run, bike, play piano, travel, work, socialize, and generally do the multitude of adult tasks that are taken for granted, though I have had a slight regression of many of these skills the past year-and-a-half due to unfortunate experiences that occurred in 2023 and 2024 which I will not detail at this time, but are directly a result of recovering from my injuries.
There’s quite a lot to unpack and process here, to make the understatement of the decade. As I have been moving forward through this anthropology class over the last five weeks, I have been stuck in a mental loop of bemoaning the lost years of my early education and how I didn’t “get the chance” to fulfill my teenage dream of growing up and documenting my experiences online as a college student. I finally realized that I could continue punishing myself for a past that was not mine to determine, or I could seize the opportunity to write about my experiences as a college student now.
Certainly, this is not the future I envisioned for myself, but it is the present that I have. And, arguably, writing my way through all of this might just be the best thing for me, not just to rehabilitate my writing skills and retain and reshape my writing voice, but to give myself grace and honor who I am today. It’s okay to grieve a future that I wanted to have and deserved to have — every human being deserves access to essential education free from abuse and harmful, world-altering, delusional bias — while also accepting where I am right now. Despite what my very harsh internal critic insists, I need to recognize that I am not a failure, even though just writing those words hurts, stinging my eyes with tears, because I truthfully do not yet believe them.
Right now, I am grappling with the heart-wrenching feeling that I was supposed to have earned a doctorate by now, be well into my career, married, and have started a family by now. None of these things have yet happened, and it’s challenging to not pressure myself with feeling like I’m running out of time and that they may never happen. Nevertheless, I persist, bolstered by my recent discovery that women who have their first child after age 40 are more likely to live past 100. Anything to say that I am right on time. Anything to soften the harsh reality of the structural violence that I have endured which has delayed and interfered with my life in ways that I am only now fully beginning to understand.
Now I am more certain than ever, writing here is exactly what I need right now. When I look back at all the amazing things I have experienced in my life, I wish that I had been writing about them real time and sharing them. There has always been this deep pervasive fear of being seen, being perceived, just being myself that has stopped me, like I wasn’t allowed to just be, even when I am completely alone. But I have done enough internal work to realize I have every right to exist and express myself as does anyone else, and as a woman in 2025, especially one that carries so many marginalized ethnic identities, there perhaps has never been a more important time to express myself as much as I possibly can. Not for anyone else, not to perform myself, but to simply express, to exist, to enjoy the vicissitudes of life without reservation.
Besides, this is getting good now. I’m still moving forward studying consciousness, I am still going towards what I have always wanted to know. But now? Now it’s even better, because the rapid increase of aptitude in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and large language models over especially the last three years is pressing right into the intersection of exactly what I want to study — the biological basis of consciousness. There has arguably never been a better time to pursue this question, because we are now capable of studying consciousness in ways that simply did not exist before. The black box problem in large language models mirrors the hard problem of consciousness. Both of these problems fascinate me to no end, and I highly suspect that they are related in some way. Only time will tell, and when I finally spiral around to the neurobiology that I really want to learn, who knows what I’ll discover then.