It has been quite a while since I’ve written here — the last time I published anything was at the end of my freshman year, and now I’m almost done with junior year.
TL;DR of a few life updates:
I am still a math major at Stanford, but now I’m also minoring in biology and political science, and will probably do my master’s in CS over the next year. (TBD on PhD!)
I studied abroad in Australia this year! I had the most extraordinary time learning ecology in the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s two largest sand islands (which I didn’t even know was a thing), and a beautiful, albeit slightly treacherous and leech-y rainforest.
Lamington National Park, Queensland
While at Stanford, I’ve dabbled in a few things: number theory, outdoors trip leading, privacy law and environmental compliance through the ever-wonderful RegLab, amateur oceanography, computational earth systems, formal theory (game theory for political contexts), all while drinking a lot of coffee from CoHo.
This summer I’ll be at a climate startup working on modeling the subsurface, using limited geophysical data to predict what’s underground.
It’s hard to measure just how much my perspective has changed since living out my first few years as an “adult” and being among some of the most passionate, kind, interesting, hilarious, and genuine people I have ever met. Every time I call my mom to tell her about a new minor I have declared or the life’s calling I have discovered, she nods her head in support and patiently waits for a pivot in ~3 months. And although there is very little I would change about the past few years, I do regret never documenting Thoughts & Feelings to look back on.
So, here we are. Back on Substack.
But we’re undergoing a rebranding…a metamorphosis of sorts. This substack used to be "Letter? I Hardly Know Her!", and while I will forever stand by this name, it feels like time for a shift into something a little less polished and a little more open-ended.
In sophomore year, I took a mandatory writing class no student at Stanford can escape. Each class has its own theme, and I ended up choosing “The Rhetoric of Bodies” for no other reason than it fit well into my schedule. I wrote my final essay on the body underwater — specifically on diving, and the way it shifts the physical and metaphysical limits of the self.
Athena and I diving in Raja Ampat, Indonesia
Writing this (incredibly verbose) essay was surprisingly informative to my own view on selfhood, but it mostly gave me an excuse to tell everyone and their mom that I was getting my scuba diving certification.Regardless, to help explain this new direction, here’s an excerpt from it:
In Plato’s The Republic, Socrates compares the difficulty of knowing our own souls to knowing the sea god Glaucus, whose body is constantly changing and modified by virtue of his existence underwater. His true nature can’t easily be made out by catching brief glimpses of him; his original parts have been broken, his whole body maimed by the waves and by the shells, seaweeds, and stones that have attached themselves to him over time. The name Glaucus itself means a greenish-gray color; he can only be known partially and opaquely. But just because one can never know him fully does not mean he is not there. Passersby may each view him differently, but their varied perception of him does not change who he is.
There is similarly a constant struggle to see ourselves clearly, to know exactly who we are at any moment. But how can you know something that is continuously changing? You can only keep track of what you observe, and let that shape who you might become. Much like the water that makes up most of our being, we are in flux at every moment, both minutely and not. We are not still beings. With every breath, we move in space and time.
Diving reminds us that we are part of something greater, something ineffable. We cannot be easily or exactly defined at any moment, because our potential makes us so much more than that.
I used to hold myself to the impossible standard of trying to know everything about anything that I wanted to write about, which inevitably led to writing nothing at all. So in the spirit of embracing flux, I want to write more pieces here that aren’t necessarily fully formed or polished, but instead serve as snapshots of what I’ve been thinking, learning, and doing.
As they say: a body in motion stays in motion. (Full credit goes to Newton for his laws, nice work buddy.)
We had no idea what constellations we were pointing at.
Let’s see where this takes us — I’ll see you soon.
Cheers,
Apoorva
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what a queen
Apoorva! what a beautiful piece. cannot wait for what's to come, i miss you dearly