Feb. 17, 2026, marks three years to the day that I got into Hopkins, and this anniversary has me thinking so much about the things that’ve stayed the same. In the process, I’ve discovered that I have trouble letting go.
For example: I have a meticulous cyclical order in which I consume media throughout the year: Friends to How I Met Your Mother to Psych to Gilmore Girls to The West Wing, and repeat. I bounce from comfort to comfort, from Central Perk to MacLaren’s to Luke’s. And it extends beyond just TV: every visit home, I am greeted by the Laura Ingalls Wilder books I first read when I was five years old and charmed by the descriptions of churning butter and living in a log cabin in the woods; without fail, I can never take a trip home without rereading These Happy Golden Years and imagining myself in the beautiful dresses and hats that my beloved protagonist once wore.
I find myself in similar cycles with food. For two weeks straight after the winter storm of 2026, I ate exclusively loaded baked potatoes topped with black bean chili, greek yogurt, cheddar and spring onions. Before that, it was a creamy mushroom miso pasta. I’ve even had a two-year fixation on a really specific wonton brand that I once used to eat almost daily in my sophomore year. My comfort meal is always the same: two perfectly fried sunny-side-up eggs on a bed of rice, topped with a drizzle of sriracha.
When first reflecting on these rituals, I thought that the connection between them was simple — that the habits which stuck around are ones I shared with all the people I’ve once loved. And there was quite a lot of strong support for this conclusion: my favorite sitcoms are the ones I watched with my parents for the first time. Despite hating political dramas, I fell in love with The West Wing because of my dad’s love for Aaron Sorkin’s writing. It was friends that first introduced me to the wontons I still eat to this day, the same friends for whom I first made my creamy mushroom-y pasta.
But in my attempts to further elucidate the origins of these attachments, I’ve found a very different thread tying them together. They are each relics of a different Shreya, echoing through the Shreya who now pursues these older versions of herself relentlessly. My favorite shows still recall the Shreya who spent evenings eating dinner in front of the television, the Shreya who now knows by heart the episodes of Gilmore Girls that capture the magic of the snow outside her window. Even the dish I consider my signature, the sunny-side-up eggs on a bed of rice, call back the memory of the 17-year old Shreya from senior year, who finally perfected the cook time for jammy eggs the morning that she was accepted into and committed to the school, and the city she’d call home. The “creamy-mushroom-miso-pasta” Shreya was the one who straightened her hair because she had absolutely no clue how to take care of her natural waves, and wanted to look just as beautiful as the rest of her friends.
In isolation, my hyperfixations aren’t particularly concerning. But oftentimes I’ve found myself paralyzed by my inability to let go of all of these old Shreyas, especially when I don’t recognize the one I see in the mirror today. In some ways, the new me is so much happier. She wears her natural hair, has an infinitely better sense of style; she’s even learned how to bake in addition to cooking, adding an entire new genre to her repertoire of food-related activities.
But it is terrifyingly strange to let go of the old Shreya, for whom all of these things I’ve mentioned were once new — the Shreya who blissfully knew nothing about the world and was constantly excited about learning something new, instead of holding on so tightly to the old. Old Shreya was unfinished, full of possibilities and still learning how to tie all these different facets of her personality together.
The new Shreya is almost a complete picture, a mosaic of every single person she’s ever loved. She’s graduating from the school she wasn’t even committed to three years ago. And even though that’s supposed to be this huge, transformative period of change, there’s so much finality in knowing exactly what my life is going to look like for the next few years. Even though there’s so much ahead of me to learn and experience, I can’t help but think that the Shreya I am at 20 will calcify and harden, that returning to these comforts constantly is keeping me from adding to the Shreya I am now.
I just have to remind myself that calcification is a good thing — setting in stone a 20-year old me doesn’t mean that I can’t grow a new layer of “Shreya”-ness. Maybe “finishing” a layer of myself doesn’t mean that I’m “finished,” too. Maybe it just means it’s time for a new layer.
Shreya Tiwari is a junior from Austin, Texas, studying BME. She is a Managing Editor for The News-Letter. Her column, "Invisible Strings," shares stories about all the people, places, and feelings to which she has “invisible strings,” intimate hidden connections that she hopes to reveal to readers with each piece.
