at least you have beautiful ghosts

i downloaded my facebook messenger data and did some analysis on it. well, actually, other people already wrote most of the code for the analysis and i just made some edits, but i get eg. graphs of my activity from 2016-2020

the results were mostly what i expected, though there were a few observations i was surprised about, namely:

• there was no noticeable increase in my messaging activity during covid
• my 3rd and 4th largest chats, and 5 of the top 10, were dms (i expected the top of the list to be dominated by group chats from summer programs or large mit classes or whatever)
• thinking about scale is weird too, like, my largest dm is the same size as 10000 doctor-patient meeting notes from the previous post, which may be a nonsensical comparison but it also just feels wrong, like, have we really exchanged as many words as there are in 10000 stories of illness? 

january 4th was the mit housing deadline, and i decided to cancel my housing. there were two main reasons behind the decision — the main one was that january 4th is an absurdly early deadline and i didn’t want to commit myself to living at mit for the next four months when i didn’t yet have much information on potential alternatives; the second reason was that i have ~2 friends assigned to macgregor this spring and various mildly unpleasant memories of the place, so being forced to spend a lot of alone time there didn’t seem like a great idea

iap has mostly been going well. i gave a short presentation to wrap up the healthcare contract and started the drp on prediction, learning, and games, which is my first time really reading math since maybe the spring semester. it’s quite intense and i don’t think i fully understand the intuition behind the content (which is still a good contrast from last year’s drp, where we moved incredibly slowly) but sometimes i just solve book exercises by moving inequalities around and then i look at my solution and am confused about how you’d come up with it. the whole math project lab testing thing has gone a lot more poorly; we were assigned a project which is essentially modeling the process of crumpling paper, and i’m quite stuck on how to approach it

i’ve been thinking about the cliche that goes along the lines of, “you can’t love someone else until you learn to love yourself”. which, like, is objectively wrong in the sense that it frames the capacity to love as more discrete than continuous, and in the sense that you can compartmentalize however you feel about yourself without it getting in the way of your other interactions, but i am finally realizing how colossally i’ve failed at this. the most recent instances of me breaking off a close friendship or relationship were nominally because i no longer liked the other person, but i think it was really me going through an extended bout of pessimism or frustration with myself or whatever else it happened to be. if i could see into the future maybe i would’ve realized those feelings would eventually subside, and then maybe i wouldn’t have made any of those choices, but of course you’re never able to look so i guess now i’m stuck with fragments of relationships and crumbs of apologies. not that i’m trying to blame my failures on an inability to perform divination; i recognize this is very much my fault, but i also know it wouldn’t be as much of a problem if i could better contextualize feelings in the bigger picture

and i really have no sense of how common this is, because people rarely bring up the ways in which they destroy friendships, and they write about it even less often. i don’t know if i’m just exceptionally bad at managing all this, or if it’s some unspoken norm, or if you’ve all done the same things and just haven’t realized it yet. i mean, i assume most things i write about are things that other people also experience, just because i don’t really know why else you’d be interested enough to still read them, but living off of assumptions gets a little lonely sometimes, you know? 

so i guess it’s time to figure out what self-love actually is. i used to think it was something related to imposters syndrome or issues with self-esteem, because those were the two problems i heard people complain frequently about. and i never really solved those problems as much as i made them irrelevant, eg. i don’t bother with thinking about self-worth when applying to stuff or meeting new people because i don’t see the point (which is quite different from actually having high self-esteem or whatever). but i guess imposters syndrome is only the tip of the iceberg of personal turbulence and i have a lot more to work on