Fearless

So it's been a while and it's not like I have time to be writing, but I think it's really necessary given all the stuff that's been going on lately. This semester has been an emotional rollercoaster, as I've discussed with a handful of my friends already, and there hasn't been a week where I've felt one constant emotion. It's great to feel happy for a full week obviously, but if I'm going to be sad, I'd like that emotion to be continuous rather than constantly interrupted by other things! I Skyped a friend and in the range of 3 hours I legitimately cried, laughed, and got angry. In three hours. It's exhausting not being able to keep up with your own feelings. While sophomore year felt like a slump, monotonous and repetitive, at least it was consistent. It made me jaded, but it did not prepare me for this semester, where I've done the absolutely opposite of felt consistent. I miss stability. Being a Dhoom captain is something I thought ...

Why is it that when we see friends around campus and they ask how we are, almost all of our default answers involve being "busy but good"? How often do we take the opportunity to actually understand how we are feeling and why we are feeling that way? Maybe we won't reach an answer because even our state emotions are very dynamic, changing minute to minute according to what's going on around us, but we would've at least delved further into ourselves and understood something. We are never feeling nothing. And since when has "busy" been the first word that comes out of everyone's mouth even if it's not true? Here at Duke, we don't want anyone to think that we're falling behind and not doing as much as the next guy because that would apparently mean that our aspirations and goals aren't as high. We must constantly be volunteering or working in the lab or at some sort of meeting or practice otherwise we're not doing enough. I don'...

So it's been almost 2 and a half months since I last wrote, and why I haven't in so long I have absolutely no excuse for. Yeah, I was busy, but I definitely still had time. I guess I just couldn't find anything substantial enough to write. As I get older, even in the past year, I feel as if the things that are worthy of discussion or thought are becoming more and more specific and of a smaller range. I think I've forgotten the freedom that I wanted from this blog when I first starting writing it. Some people really like it, which I'm so thankful for, but some people also think I'm too dramatic and/or personal, and I've never been good at taking negativity, I suppose. That's why I was unsure what was important enough for me to write, but I should be able to write whatever I want, right? Sure. I guess the first thing I'd want to address is the fact that we are hella old now... Juniors in college... It feels like just yesterday I was being left out...

Today I volunteered at the Triangle Caregivers Conference, which is a collection of vendors/exhibitors as well as sessions for caregivers who are taking care of spouses or parents or relatives with a debilitating disease. It was a really interesting experience and I enjoyed the many conversations I had with people who were interested in the only Indian girl under 30 at the conference. By that I mean, only Indian, only person under 30. Both things.  One of the things that really struck me was how careful these caregivers have to become in what they say to their impaired loved one and also to the children of the family who will take offense to the mood swings that their grandparents are having or be so hurt that their grandparent won't remember them. You have to lie to your loved one sometimes, just to keep the peace and hold down the fort. You have to give children only age appropriate information. You have to do this without guilt. That's something I would have a lot of trou...

So I haven't written in a while or had any life crises or anything so I figured I'd just write about what I've been doing and learning life wise this summer. I'm doing research at Duke through the Bass Connections program so I get lots of money to live here and then go to a neuroimmunology conference in Montana in the middle of July. I'm looking at how overexpression of a protein whose gene has been shown to predispose Alzheimer's disease affects a mitochondrial stress response called the unfolded protein response. Pretty much it means that when there are a lot of unfolded proteins in the mitochondria, there are pathways that cause more chaperones and proteases to be transcribed and translated to deal with it. It's an interesting project, though it's hard to see the real world application right away. It was for me anyway. If this mitochondrial stress response is an implication of Alzheimer's, we can try to treat the cells with drugs and see how th...

My sister just put her head in my lap before falling asleep for school tomorrow and broke down crying. Crying that it wasn't fair that everyone else got to see their brothers and sisters every day and I was 500 miles away. Crying that she couldn't come home from school and have me waiting there for her and "not care" about everything she told me about her day and have me laugh at the silly dances she did or have me sing while she plays Disney songs on the piano. Crying that she didn't want me to leave on Saturday. And here I am crying because I don't really want to either. Maybe this is something that everyone has already known but I just now realized it but I love my family so much. I know I've been so bipolar about my family in the past two years and I've felt the repercussions of that too, but I feel like something hit me when I came home this time. I feel so much of the pain they feel, every bit of stress from handling family conflict and work d...

I think one of the hardest things for us to do is to be truly honest with ourselves. Sometimes I'll try to sit down with the sole purpose of allowing myself to just take it like it is, but even when you do that, it's hard to not suppress the feelings and facts of yourself that you wish weren't true. It's really easy to convince yourself that something about you is true in order to make it work with what you want or what others want of you, but isn't it better that we face the truth early rather than let our lives continue with lies? It's ironic how I always want others to be brutally honest with me but I can't do the same for myself, but that's also true of a lot of things. Sometimes I'd say it's the fact that we're really afraid to confront the truth and make a change to act on it, and I am plenty guilty of that. Even as I say this and know that some of the decisions I've made are due to familial pressure or personal desire, I'm sti...