Ambition is a luxury.

There are days when I feel like life has already ended, even though my body keeps showing up for it every day. I can't point to any exact moment when it all started or happened. There is no singular disaster or cinematic collapse I can point to, but I know it ended somewhere along the way quietly but surely, like the war that never announced the end

I carry a deep, almost an unbearable awareness of what privilege means. I sit here typing this, I know what this means to me, I know the space I occupy in this world. I understand my privilege well, not the loud gratitude on cue way, but the suffocating kind, the type that tells me “I have had more than others, why do you breathe so heavy, also why am I breathing so heavy. I have been given access to an opportunity, most importantly the ability to have ambitions, room to fail and fall apart, spaces to dream, even my ambitions, I realize now, are a luxury. This ambition is not born equally; it only exists if you are privileged enough,  only if you have the time to do more than survive. When life is negotiated in urgencies, ambition is postponed, and dreams become expensive

The very ability to want a big life is shaped long before desire ever enters the body. The world has already drawn invisible borders around what feels permissible to hope for. The environment sets the ceiling of possibility before we are old enough to test it. Some of us grow up looking at the sky as a direction others learn early that it is only weather. I understand now that even my capacity to feel disappointed in myself comes from this privilege. Only those who were allowed to imagine more can mourn the distance between who they are and who they thought they might become. And this is the cruelty of it. I've been given a privilege that others don't have. I've left so much behind to be here, and I'm grateful for everything, truly I am. But gratitude and grief can live in the same house, can't they?

I have left so much behind to be here. I'm grateful for everything, in fact, painfully grateful to people here in PB. I say this without any irony that thank you for accommodating everything about me, even my flaws, especially my flaws. In a world that keeps demanding performance, you offered patience.

I used to hate tech; I still do sometimes. It always felt soulless to me, it felt like systems without warmth, randomly generated lines of gibberish, but here in this place, unexpectedly, I found humanity. This has fundamentally changed how I view everything. Something when it's truly great, we call it art, and Humanity, I believe, is a prerequisite for art, without it, all creation is just plain machine (derogatory). Here, I learned that even inside cold frameworks, codes, people can still choose tenderness.

I will forever remain disappointed in myself. Because I know I can do better than this. Because I remember who I used to be. I used to be smart. I used to be used to, used to, i fucking used to. There is a quiet grief in watching others flourish while I struggle just to survive. No im not jealous, not I am bitter, it's just grief. The kind that sits beside you and does not leave, sometimes I feel human. Other days, I feel more like a sound. An echo of who I was. I touch the world not as myself but as a residue of who I used to be. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me? Or am I just noise passing through?

One of my favorite books is Frankenstein, and there is a line, let me Google and paste it: “Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.” I hold onto this line because it refuses to romanticize pain while still choosing life. It does not say life is beautiful. It says life is dear. There is a difference. That's all I wanna say to my juniors (I am not a good advisor, but listen to my fuck ups) remember PB kids. Remember, other than death, all failure is psychological