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Snow has a way of transforming the world, turning even the most ordinary day into something soft, quiet and full of magic.
My thumb flipped the page, and I sat up straighter, holding my breath as my eyes glossed over the next page. Wait — what? How did the main character’s brother just get killed like that? He was alive in the last chapter...
From the outside, nothing looks wrong. I reluctantly get out of bed, go where I’m supposed to go, yap, laugh and dillydally. It doesn’t seem that anything has changed. I’m still me: I deliver the same jokes and remarks, I have the same competitive spirit, I have the same interests I am very vocal about. However, underneath the noise, it’s just silence.
I’ve always found peace in the sky. When I was younger, I’d look up at the clouds during long car rides and let my imagination go wild with stories of a fictional man jumping through the clouds. Even as I got older, my appreciation and admiration for the sky only grew stronger. I am from an area known as the Sun City. As such, I’ve always been able to define my home through beautiful sunsets and sunrises. When I came to Baltimore my freshman year, I was surprised by how different the sky was — sunny days felt like a cage and cloudy days were only dreary. I felt as though I was caged up by an unseen force that prevented me from being able to relax and take in my environment.
When I was a child, I thought that eating turkey on Thanksgiving was a historical myth, like finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow on St. Patrick’s Day or getting hit by Cupid's arrow on Valentine’s Day. Each November, I would make as many hand turkeys as I could possibly fit in my sparkly pink backpack, and then go to my Abuela’s house to eat a traditional feast of pan de bono, empanadas, ajiaco, mazorca, platanos, arroz con leche and jugo de maracuya. Like we all do every year, right?
As expected, my first semester at Hopkins yielded a welcome amount of intellectually stimulating conversations. Yet one that occurred recently has stuck in my mind. It prompted a thorough self-examination of my beliefs, which is a place I didn’t think I would reach after only a few months on campus.
When I was little, I always made sure to turn on my nightlight before heading to sleep. From the concept of monsters hiding under my bed to other unknowns in the darkness, I had my fears and suspicions. However, a tiny, dim light capable of warmly illuminating my whole bedroom was all that I needed to give me the assurance that it was probably just my mind trying to play tricks on me and that if a monster were really hiding underneath my bed, I would at least be able to foresee it instead of being blindly frightened by it.
Another sunset seeps through my windows, staying for a moment. It paints my white walls with an orange and pink tinge, the type of color you think of when a warm hand rests on your shoulder. Each ray of sunlight finds its place: on the mirror hanging from my door, on the boxes filled with my belongings and on the suitcases leaning against the wall.
The person I am today was beautifully woven and built piece by piece by my mother; she built my wings to fly. The transition from having my mom right beside me to being 8,000 miles away from her is tough.
There’s a poem I keep thinking about: “Replica of the Thinker.” In it, a copy of Rodin’s famous statue sits at a museum, hunched over that familiar pose of “deep thought.” But he isn’t thinking. “His head is filled with iron and bronze,” the poet writes, “not neurons and God.” He looks like a thinker, but is he actually thinking?
“What’s going on here?”
Yesterday I took the MBTI test again for the first time in eight months: ISTJ-T. I didn’t think much of the four letters themselves — I’ve seen them enough times by now. What caught my attention was the last letter, a subtle change from A (assertive) to T (turbulent). It made me stop and think about when I became more worried and prone to overthinking, not because I believe in a personality test like it’s my Roman Empire, but because some of the prompts in the test do reflect my current feelings toward my own stage of growth. For context, assertive people are usually calm and self-assured, while turbulent people tend to be more anxious and self-critical.
I recently finished the latest season of Dancing With the Stars. For those who weren’t keeping up, Robert Irwin and his professional ballroom partner, Witney Carson, brought home the highly coveted Mirrorball trophy.
We’re getting to the time of year when it's easy to be lost in the past. The same red bows are tied on lampposts in parks and outside dingy shopping centers. The same massive wreaths decorate even more massive malls. But with every passing year, the bows seem a little more at eye level and the wreaths are a little smaller. You bake the same cookies, and then suddenly a research project on salmonella makes you no longer want to lick the batter out of the bowl. While wading through homework, I’ve been reflecting on the holidays, which used to be documented by where I performed and when, but can now be tallied by which Christmas movies I watch, which treats I decide to enjoy and which cities I want to visit.
On the first day of fall break, I flew from Baltimore to Toronto to visit my best friend, who is studying engineering at the University of Toronto (popularly abbreviated as U of T). The last time we saw each other was in July, during the final leg of our grad trip in Seoul. It had been about two months since then, which I realized was the longest we’ve been apart — that’s the thing about high school, you’re never really separated from your best friends for more than the two months of summer break — so, after many tearful phone calls, she finally convinced me to visit her.
Tangshan was ravaged by a 7.6 magnitude earthquake on July 28, 1976. An earthquake report written years later said that within minutes, “85% of the buildings collapsed or were rendered unusable, all services failed, and most highway and railway bridges collapsed or were seriously damaged.” An article in the Building Safety Journal described how, because the earthquake struck during the humid midsummer season, “survivors scrambled out into the open naked, covered only in dust and blood, to see the entire city levelled.”
Hey Alan,
Letters Without Limits, founded by students at Johns Hopkins and Brown University, connects volunteers with palliative care and hospice patients to co-create “Legacy Letters.” These letters capture memories, values and lessons that patients wish to share, preserving stories that might otherwise be lost. By honoring these voices and preserving legacies, Letters Without Limits hopes to affirm the central role of humanism in medicine, reminding us that every patient is more than their illness and that their voices deserve to be heard. As you read these powerful Legacy Letters, we invite you to pause, reflect and recognize the beauty in every life.
In high school, they put you through every career exploration website in the book with endless surveys to fill the time. What are your hobbies? Are you a social person? A visual learner or auditory? After these life-changing questions, small colorful blurbs would appear, possible careers ranging from travel agent to journalist, salesman to entertainer. Over and over, you complete these surveys, for four years. But at the end of the day, the core question is the same one we were given as children for icebreaker worksheets. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” My question in return, stated or not, was often “Can I pick more than one?”
“Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other,” Danusha Laméris avows in her short poem “Small Kindnesses.”