Dear Reader...

Dear Reader,

I don’t know about you, but I have regrets. There are things I’ve said and things I’ve done that I wish I could unsay and undo. “If I knew then what I know now…” is, to me, the story of human existence. And it’s pointless to finish the hypothetical, because 1) you can’t go back and 2) the only reason you know what you know now is that you screwed up then. But I can’t help myself: Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I could go back and make a different decision, or change someone else’s decision that affected me. I know that in some way--maybe massive, maybe too small to notice--I would be a different person today.

I’ve thought a lot about this topic, but the book I read for this project, Freakonomics, stimulated me to think some more. The story about Ted Kaczynski (aka the Unabomber) and Roland G. Fryer made me wonder: What is it that makes a life turn out the way it does? Is it fate? Random chance? The environment? The will (or lack thereof) to overcome difficulties? All of my pieces for this project reflect that concern in some way.

The first piece, a pantoum called “Here/There”, shows my existential anxiety. I know which road I’ve taken, but I don’t know if it was the right one or what the other one would have been like, and I struggle with that. I think the genre is good for my purpose because the repeated lines evoke the cascade of thoughts in a restless brain, and I’ve certainly lost some sleep thinking about this stuff.

The second piece is a personal narrative entitled “The Bike.” (Be forewarned: It’s pretty long.) In it, I recall an event that seemed small at the time but ended up transforming my life (and I don’t think that’s an understatement). Underlying the whole thing is the same question I discussed above: What if this little thing hadn’t happened? But the tone of the piece isn’t really anxious; you could almost call it romantic. I’m looking back fondly at my 14- and 15-year-old self.

It’s not a coincidence that at the moment when I’m about to graduate from high school, I’m remembering what I was like at the beginning of high school. My thoughts about the last four years are conflicted. I think of my high school freshman self as a clean slate: a kid who could have turned into almost anything. Back then, when I closed my eyes, I could see myself going to Harvard. I could also see myself being a professional tennis player. I could also see myself dropping out of school and riding my bike around all day.

The last four years have unfolded, and I don’t have much to complain about. I have a lot of great memories from high school. (Don’t tell anyone, but part of me wishes I could stay.)

Still, I’ve realized that I miss the sense of possibility that I had four years ago. Not that my life is over now that I’m eighteen years old, but it feels like the path has narrowed. I didn’t apply to Harvard, I didn’t drop out of high school, and I might not ever make it to state for tennis, let alone be a professional player. None of those things was ever likely, and I don’t know if I would have really wanted any of them, but it was cool that when I closed my eyes none of them seemed completely crazy.

Those last three paragraphs are a bunch of BS.

I mean, they’re not entirely untrue, but they’re missing some key facts. My 14-year-old self was not a clean slate. I was tormented by existential questions: Why am I here? What am I supposed to do with my life? Why are some people poor and hungry while I’m living in luxury? Why is it that I can live in luxury and still not feel happy? Those questions were what sent me out on the bike in search of answers. Somehow the questions were less overwhelming when I was moving, having an adventure.

I was also painfully shy, as I describe in “The Bike.” I didn’t have a lot of friends in middle school. It is what it is. I don’t hold anything against the people who weren’t very nice to me in sixth and seventh grade. It’s just a bad age. I’m friends with a lot of those people now. But even though people had gotten nicer by high school, there’s no doubt that my previous experiences of social rejection still affected me in the early years of high school. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that too. I told you I had regrets, and some of my regrets from those years stem from craving social acceptance and doing the wrong thing. Not drugs or anything like that, but other stuff.

I know a decent number of freshmen, and sometimes I’ve caught myself thinking of them as clean slates, the same way I think of my freshman self. And it’s not entirely wrong, because it is an age of rapid change, both because of biology (the brain is developing really fast) and social custom (the transition to high school). But it’s not right either. In a nutshell, that’s what the third piece, a “quality” entitled “Hindsight,” is about. I’m shocking myself back to reality. It gets a little dark at the end, just so you know.

The fourth piece is another pantoum, called “Downhill From Here.” The repetition of the genre, which is my “golden thread,” demonstrates a subtle evolution. I’m still uneasy about the past, the future, and the road not taken, but I come to embrace the uncertainty. The title is intentionally confusing--”all downhill from here” is generally a bad thing, but the poem shows my acceptance of reality, which is a good thing. I’m still a little uncomfortable and confused, but I’m less uncomfortable and confused than before.

My expository essay explores the concept of free will. I wrote a paper and at least one in-class essay about the topic this year, and I could probably write a whole book about it at this point. I struggled to keep it short, but hopefully it’s worth reading despite its length. It was fun to write because I integrated literature (Slaughterhouse-Five and Oedipus) with philosophy and science.

This letter is long enough to be two more pieces by itself, so I’ll stop here. I hope you enjoy my project as much as I enjoyed working on it.