Dear Lana,

I realize that I’m not too attached to any idea of being young. I feel that a big source of anxiety for adults is losing their youth, but that’s something I don’t really care about.

Being inside most of the time, I notice that I started to gain some weight around my thighs. Normally, that would bother me, but there’s nobody left to impress. Gaining weight is also a natural part of aging. It is a lot easier to maintain weight when you are younger. There’s chronic pain that sprouts throughout my body nowadays. Sometimes, it bothers me when I am trying to do something productive. Most of the time I could shrug it away, but it is becoming progressively harder to nowadays. I guess this is also a part of aging — more pain. I don’t really like this part of aging.

Time genuinely flows faster. I am more capable of doing things in my life, but there is also less time to do it. There’s this weird paradox — I used to waste so much time when I was younger and feel like I have accomplished so much; I now am able to accomplish more than before, yet I feel like I have not done anything. In this way, I feel the universe is profoundly incongruent. There exists a disconnect between doing and feeling. You can either feel like you have done something, or you can actually do it and feel like it was never enough.

I find it interesting that humans are given a choice when they crash land on Earth. You can either choose to remain at the crater in which you are born, or you can move around to find a better crater.

Everyone is given a place at birth; some are born far more fortunate than others. This disconnect is so ingrained in society that it seems antithetical that the world could have been designed like this. I feel that it is very easy to yearn for a life when you were born with everything that you do not have. It would make life easier, wouldn’t it? It seems human. It seems so far-fetched, like some promised land dangling in the corner of your eye. But when you turn around to look for it, you realize that it wasn’t there; it was just a construction of your mind wandering in the emptiness of the world, latching onto a thought that would allow you to get through one more day.

The more I grow up, the more I am convinced that life is nothing more than a set of physical sensations. I’ve tried to convince myself that there’s something more to life than about phenomena, but I’m not sure I can anymore. The world seems more alien beyond what is around me. I used to believe that this sensation would go away, but the more I think about it, the less I am convinced that it will. It is a feeling that breeds with adulthood, there is not a -hood after adulthood.