boarding school

I’ve had a couple of drinks, and I’m sitting at the Chase Sapphire Lounge in Hong Kong. I’ve just been traveling with my parents for slightly more than a week. It was eventful. I feel that my parents treat me like an adult now, including respecting my consideration to join the Peace Corps. They seem to acknowledge that I’ve been able to organize a successful life against their advice countless times, making me equipped to understand all the considerations in my life decisions better than they can. I also exhibit a higher level of competence than they do now, making me in charge of most considerations we make when traveling. I feel like I’ve come closer to achieving psychological independence.

For as long as I remember, I really wanted to go to boarding school. A lot of my friends went to boarding school. I don’t know if I self-selected into having a boarding school personality, or if the personalities who selected boarding school also selected me. Boarding school is really just college-lite. Boarding school is more independent than regular public high school, and college is more independent than boarding school. I am an independent person, and I pride myself on my independence. Going to boarding school seems like a logical origins story for me. Unfortunately, I didn’t attend boarding school, so this is not my actual history.

A lot of my past isn’t beautiful. If I attended boarding school, it would have been beautiful. Instead, I grew up in the suburbs, living without an understanding of aesthetics until I left.

After I discovered my sense of aesthetics, some time in college, my life has been organized in the pursuit of beautiful things. It’s a hefty feeling, weighing me own because life was so much lighter when I did not have a sense of aesthetics. Now, the rest of my life is in the pursuit of aesthetic things, regardless of how attainable they are. I am able to accomplish certain things — consumer things — quite easily. I can buy expensive things quite easily, but I’m not choosing to do that quite yet in my life. I like the apartment in which I currently live. I like the gorpcore aesthetic that SF embodies and encourages. I don’t need YSL just yet in my life. What is harder to achieve is being a part of certain societies that I am not a part of. I probably won’t be a part of the founder or modeling community unless I encounter the right combination of initiative and serendipity. Even so, I don’t know if it would be enough.

I wasn’t chosen for some things. I didn’t choose other things. I wasn’t given all of the opportunities, nor did I follow through on all the opportunities I was given. I wish I could change that, starting all the way from going to boarding school.