I'm writing this on the train to Paris. We're racing through Belgium right now and I have about an hour left in the ride. It's 4:03 PM in the afternoon and the sun is starting to set over the fields. We're tearing through the countryside at 187 MPH.

I'm going to see my high school best friends Anya and Ian, Anya's boyfriend, my friend Toby, and my relatively new friend Val. I couldn't be more excited as this is the first time I've stepped foot in France in over three years. I read Uzay's 2025 year recap on the train, and started watching Episode 3 of the final season of Dark. In the episode "Adam and Eva", at exactly 3:33 PM in the afternoon CET, Martha recalled to Jonas that he tried to convince the younger version of herself that experiencing deja vu was the process of the brain recalling a memory from the future.

"Under the bridge. The light. The forest. You. I. A glitch in the matrix."

Call me crazy, but I don't believe in coincidences. The number 333 has shown up in many places in my life, sometimes even once a day, sometimes multiple times a day. The price I pay for something, the amount of money in my bank account, the time left in the song when I happen to check, and very often the time of day. It has most notably shown up when I was on the headline of the Star Tribune, Minnesota's state newspaper, wearing my race bib from Spirit Mountain in Duluth during my junior year of high school in 2020.

I believe in magic. I believe that there is much that we don't understand, about the electromagnetic spectrum, about time, about intelligence. That someday what feels like magic now will be science. I believe in Dreams, intuition, and faith. I'll save the mechanisms of these theories for a later post.

There are times in life where I've "glitched". A single massive profound idea that falls into my lap randomly, usually after some major event. This year my biggest "glitch" was after HackMIT in September. I woke up and could not remember my phone password that I had for the past 6 months. Sure, maybe it was a flaw in my memory, but I genuinely tried every six number combination I could think of and it was none of them. I told my friend Joyce that I was convinced someone had changed my password somehow without me knowing, she thought I was insane. Regardless, I reset my phone completely and changed my password using my iCloud account and that was that.

A common theme in my life is ending up on a plane, no free Wifi, having to loop the same one-to-five songs over and over because for some reason I forget to download music, or I have to reset my phone, or my phone is dead. Previously it's been Quinn XCII, Labrinth, Sia, or Flipturn. The day I flew home from HackMIT was one such day, and I looped "The Adults are Talking" by The Strokes.

For a second, I invite you to slip into a brief moment in time, just after the Uber driver from MIT connected me with an Indian cloth supplier after I told him about the idea for my brand, SPoNGe.

I relish the feeling of the soft trickles of tears slipping out of the corners of my eyes, as my chest briefly caves for a cough of joy to bubble out of me.

I am walking to gate E10, fresh off of winning 3rd place at HackMIT with an incredible team of my favorite people on this planet. Serendipity and luck abound. Energy is high. God is good.

I've tried to explain my theory of energy to my therapist, my mom, my cousin, my best friend, my other friends, and I still don't think anyone has groked it quite as well as The Alchemist, specifically the wise old character written in Paulo Coelo's novel, "The Alchemist". I know it's woo, but I am a big believer that there are physical principles rooted in the E&M laws that we haven't completely wrapped our heads around as a human race. Take BCIs for example, or even LLMs. We don't fundamentally know WHY they work. Why exactly does gradient descent work? We know the process, but we don't know the fundamental reason. Why did evolution design neural networks in the way it did? Efficiency? Pleasure? Survival?

If it all boils down to that then why do humans care so much about art? About a random niche flavor of cheese? Chasing a piece of plastic down a field?

I claim there are spiritual things in this world that are rooted in physical principles we haven't fully discovered yet.

Anyways, back to the plot.

The $550 Gamble

So I was debating whether or not to fly to Boston. The flight was $550 from Minneapolis and I was to miss three classes on Monday, and have to Uber straight to school to make my final class. But I stuck to my guns. My guns being the heuristics of a) life is short, b) I want to live the best adventure I can, and c) I in part love life and continue to exist because of how dearly and intensely I loved my friends.

Sidenote, a funny thing about Spotify on the plane is that it caches random songs. It's like playing Minesweeper, except I click around on songs and see if they're lucky and play the first 0:01 or cooked and stay at 0:00.

Anyways, I pulled the trigger. I booked it. Already in $2000 borrowed from future Sophia from my Taco Bell scholarship from the Spring to pay for my end-of-summer California trip, and a potential $1500 for this trip and the past month, I still pulled the trigger. See, I have an interesting relationship with money. My aunt likes to say "I never think about money, when I need it, God provides". And although this is very naive, I think it gives her some arbitrary level of confidence such that she actually inspired the people around her to come together and help her chase her dream of opening an art gallery and building a life in Carmel. I don't exactly take this approach, but it is pretty funny how many times I've been almost-in-debt, or properly in debt in the last week of the month and I need to pay my credit card bill and a Manifund grant comes through, or I get $5k more of my scholarship for this year, or I win a pitch competition for $1.5k, or in this case (spoiler), I win $2k of hackathon money.

An Unquiet Mind

To be very upfront, I struggle with bipolar. A symptom of this is impulsive spending. This has bitten me in the butt before, particularly on a trip to Washington to celebrate a boy's birthday in The Enchantments, when I had maxed out my credit card, drained my bank account, and was overdue on Apple Payments for my subscriptions so Apple wouldn't let me download any new apps on my iCloud account. The Frontier agents weren't at the counter because I had arrived at the airport with 30 minutes to spare and I couldn't download the Frontier app, and Frontier won't let you download your boarding pass online within 60 minutes of the flight, so I missed my flight.

It does burn me sometimes. But for a large part of my life, having such drastic highs and lows is incredible. On the way to Boston, I finished the entire memoir "An Unquiet Mind" written by Kay Redfield Jamison. I've genuinely never felt more understood. This passage helps paint a picture of the addiction that mania can feel like sometimes:

"My mind was flying high that day, courtesy of whatever witches' brew of neurotransmitters God had programmed into my genes, and I filled page after page with what I am sure, thinking back on it, were very strange responses. It was a large class, and everyone's answers were passed forward and handed to the professor. He read aloud from a sort of random selection; midway through I heard a recital of somewhat odd associations, and I realized to my great horror that they were mine. Some of them were humorous, but a few of them were simply bizarre. Or so they seemed to me. Most of the class was laughing, and I stared at my feet in mortification. When the professor had finished reading my intensely scribbled sheets, he asked if the person who had written those particular responses would please stay behind to talk with him for a while. I was convinced that, being a psychologist, he could see straight into my psychotic underpinnings. I was terrified. Looking back on it, what I suspect he actually saw was someone who was very intense, quite determined, serious, and probably rather troubled. At the time, being acutely aware of just how disturbed I really was, I assumed that the extent of my problems was equally obvious to him. He asked me to walk back to his office with him, and, while I was conjuring up images of being admitted to a psychiatric ward, he said that in all of his years of teaching he had never encountered such "imaginative" responses to the Rorschach. He was kind enough to call creative that which some, no doubt, would have called psychotic. It was my first lesson in appreciating the complicated, permeable boundaries between bizarre and original thought, and I remain deeply indebted to him for the intellectual tolerance that cast a positive rather than pathological hue over what I had written."

— Kay Redfield Jamison, "An Unquiet Mind"

I want to get a patent. I want to start building. I want to build my clothing brand and website. I want to create the full vector art for 'Sota hacks. I want to show the world what I'm capable of.

When you have bipolar, being manic feels like you're high on epinephrine, being grateful feels like you're on MDMA. Being sleep deprived feels like you're on shrooms. Being depressed feels like there is genuinely no reason to live. Kay Redfield Jamison also paints an incredibly accurate picture:

"I would wake up in the morning with a profound sense of dread that I was going to have to somehow make it through another entire day. I would sit for hour after hour in the undergraduate library, unable to muster up enough energy to go to class. I would stare out the window, stare at my books, rearrange them, shuffle them around, leave them unopened, and think about dropping out of college. When I did go to class it was pointless. Pointless and painful. I understood very little of what was going on, and I felt as though only dying would release me from the overwhelming sense of inadequacy and blackness that surrounded me. I felt utterly alone, and watching the animated conversations between my fellow students only made me feel more so. I stopped answering the telephone and took endless hot baths in the vain hope that I might somehow escape from the deadness and dreariness."

— Kay Redfield Jamison, "An Unquiet Mind"

This is just the reality of my mind, my emotions, and my soul. I don't know what combination of genes contributes to this, James Watson is working on the magical polygenic combo with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, maybe I'll work on that. But we know empirically it's genetic, and I know empirically my grandma on my mom's side had bipolar, along with multiple of my extended family members. So, I'm not insane, at least I don't think so, it's just part of who I am, in the same way that my allergies, and my asthma are.

On Faith

That was a dark segway, but on a happier note, I want to talk about faith. One of my favorite quotes on faith comes from "Lessons in Chemistry":

"Rich people use post office boxes to shield themselves from unwanted correspondence. It's like a garbage can for mail." He reached down to his satchel and after some riffling, came up with a slip of paper. Handing it to her he said, "Here it is, the box number. But please, Mad, don't get your hopes up." "I don't have hopes," Mad explained, studying the address. "I have faith." He looked at her in surprise. "Well, that's a funny word to hear coming from you." "How come?" "Because," he said, "well, you know. Religion is based on faith." "But you realize," she said carefully, as if not to embarrass him further, "that faith isn't based on religion. Right?"

— Bonnie Garmus, "Lessons in Chemistry"

The Time My Worldview Shattered

I grew up religious, Lutheran to be specific. I loved Jesus, the Trinity, the Lord's prayer, I loved Sunday school, I loved playing Bass guitar in the adult services. And then, as some of you know, when I was 15 the pastor of my church had an affair with a singer and it completely shocked me and thus, my worldview started to crack. People weren't perfect, a man who I was supposed to respect and trust, let down the entire congregation. People picked sides, people fought, I poured through the constitution documents to no avail. There was no way to fix it. So I turned inward. What was the point of life? Why were we here? What was my purpose? Did I have a purpose? Did we go somewhere after we died? Was the world deterministic? How much control did I really have?

This set off a quest to figure out how to help the most people and be freed from my parents who were still holding going to church over 16 year old me. I schemed hard from ages 16 to 18. I wanted to buy a van and renovate it and leave Minnesota. At the same time Covid hit. I happened to move to Montana with some friends, and lived in West Yellowstone for a month to train for cross country skiing every day and do school remotely. There have been a lot of critical plot points in my life, and that was certainly one of them. I wish I had the SD cards of the vlogs I made from that era, but sadly they fell out of my SD card case and down a Berkeley sewer in 2023 #rip.

Finding My People

So where is this story going? Well, it leads to people. By the end of high school, I had become sufficiently inspired by Einstein, Elon, Elizabeth Holmes, and the Botez sisters that I decided it was possible that people like me existed. I just didn't know where to find them. So I turned to college applications. I settled on Harvard. I wanted to cross country ski there. The coach at the time, Chris City and I were talking, I visited the school to tour, and fell in love.

So, I worked my butt off, if you want more details about my senior year of high school, see this video.

Long story short, I got rejected. My next dream school on the list was UCSD for nanoengineering.

But sadly it was $60k a year out of state with tuition and living costs, and that was too much to afford without taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans. So I found a coding bootcamp in California kudos to a few really helpful people on LinkedIn to get in-state tuition.

If you want the rundown, see this post on the EA forum, but long story short, I ended up moving to Berkeley, finding Effective Altruism, the Atlas Fellowship, an EA Berkeley (shoutout Aris, Sofya, and Nat), and fell in love. I had finally found a community where I felt seen, where I felt like I belonged. Where my questions were met with enthusiasm and critical thought, and people shared the same values about progress and the future that I did.

September 2025

Fast forward three years from my first fall away from Minnesota, and it's now September of 2025. I have a ~100 person friend group that I love dearly made up of mostly Hack Clubbers, and Rat-adjacent 18-22 year olds. I am at college I finally love, with intelligent and kind professors, 20 person class sizes, and am currently in four pure technical EE classes.

But I'm not satisfied. Mostly I'm a lovesick 21 year old, but I'm also hungry, hungry to show the world what I'm capable of.

As I was sitting outside the gate, one of the people who knows me best in the world, one of my best friends texted me:

Where Am I Headed?

So what's the plan? Where am I headed? What do I want?

I don't know exactly. But I hope it's grad school in nanoengineering at UCSD. For now I'm riding the high that was HackMIT 2025. I'm going to stay on top of my schoolwork, attempt to get As (I have a 3.0 right now but I intend to graduate with a 3.5). I want to build the Beacon prototype, I want to run game nights, I want to get a rudimentary version of my clothing brand out, I want to develop UST Nexus, and I want to build a team that rallies around making 'Sota hacks the best Hackathon the best hackathon the Midwest has even seen, and finally, I'd like to start a nightclub next fall with robot fights in Minnesota, (oh hey Verda ;)).

Thank you to everyone who made this weekend incredible, cheers to more adventures <3

The Long Game

In case you were curious about my much longer term plans, I want to have houses in Brazil, Big Sur, Lakeside, Interlaken, St. Paul, and Cinque Terre. I want to learn Russian and Mandarin. I want to create nanorobots on the cell level. I think I still want 9 kids, but only want to birth 2 of those, and adopt the rest. I'm optimistic for 2026, this will be our year.

Cheers to faith, hard work, and serendipity.

I think I've always known I've been a ticking time bomb. I recall second grade Sophia at a chess tournament with sweaty hands. I had five minutes until the black minute hand pushed the red flag up as it was about to fall. The same sweaty hands I tried to hide after shaking the hands of members on the 18th hole after each of my 200 loops. I've always been running from something but never quite known what. It's almost like I create obstacles in my life that I have to solve because that's where I feel safe. By all metrics I've accomplished the dreams I set out for myself when I was younger. I'm working at a 40 person company on a sleep apnea implant writing firmware. I've learned how to code and do basic electrical engineering work. I joined a frisbee team in college, and had a chaotic year-long relationship full of adventure, love, and spontaneity.

But there's always been a feeling lurking in the shadows that the shoe would eventually drop. And March 12th of 2026 it all came crashing down. It was the afternoon of my twenty-second birthday. I was on my way to the CVS MinuteClinic when my phone buzzed for the eighteenth time that day. Another birthday text.

"Hope you're having a great day."

In that moment all I wanted was to buy a few cans of neon green spray paint and write across Minneapolis and St. Paul that I was not okay. The color would cut through the limp, gray March sky that had blanketed the city for days. Not on a bathroom stall or the back of a notebook. On everything. Highway overpasses. Bus stops. Brick buildings. Anywhere people might look for half a second so that for once I wouldn't have to pretend like I was "good".

Instead, I sat on the crinkling paper of an exam table at CVS. As if the universe had decided to play all its +4 UNO cards at once, I had also gotten my period the day before.

When she finished swabbing and then pulled a small dime of wax out of my ear, she stepped back and laughed.

"Well," she said, "you're broken head to toe."

I guess I got what I asked for. Now both the CVS MinuteClinic clinician and I knew I was not having a great day.

I might as well have gotten my birthday cake and eaten it too. The cake of course being the undeniable proof that something, somewhere, was seemingly always wrong with me.

But the strange thing about losing your mind is that it doesn't begin on your twenty-second birthday. It begins years earlier, in moments that seem small at the time. Moments that only look strange in retrospect.

Like the evening I left my drying rack in the parking garage next to my car and I spent an hour tearing through my apartment like a mad woman, eventually convinced I had hallucinated the drying rack entirely.

Or the night when I, freshly turned 18, sat on a FlixBus as it pulled into Isola Nuova after a long ride from Milan, completely certain, without a single flicker of doubt, that I was going to become Silicon Valley's next budding entrepreneur.

At the time those moments felt like intuition. Now I know they were something else.

I mistook insight for destiny. I thought I would invent nanorobots and save the world by 22. Every electric feeling meant I needed to act. And sometimes I did. One day I decided to ski 100km on a 2km loop one day, taking me 7 hours, simply because I had the idea to. It was hailed as a fun accomplishment at the Athena award banquet by the MC when I was 17. In Berkeley, I hammocked in the woods on Lake Chabot at 8pm on a random evening alone. And I've sent elaborate plans for a homestead and a surfing trip to group chats on a whim. Every sleepless night meant revelation. I had to do a launch. I dreamed out every detail. Every coincidence meant I had cracked open some deeper layer of reality that other people were too dulled or too afraid to touch. As a child I was convinced everyone could hear my thoughts. I would see the door shrink and expand as I fell asleep. I was convinced my stomach pain was God spreading out the pain of childbirth across my life. And I slept paranoid for months that someone would break into our house after the kidnapping of Jayme Closs. And maybe that's why it took me decades to admit what was happening. Because to admit that something was wrong felt like betraying the very force that had been my superpower.

For years I had been building a life on top of gasoline reserves. Flights booked at midnight impulsively. Justified by my friend's car broken down on the highway at 2am, justified by seeing my family in Europe, justified to visit a friend I had just met from Twitter. Grand plans sketched out by my brain faster than my body could keep up with. Ideas so radiant they made ordinary life feel dim and intolerable by comparison. The energy was contagious. I would dance in my room at 2am, text a hundred people in a day, post a barrage of tweets on X, and book out my calendar for a week. I loved intensity because intensity made me feel alive. It made me feel special. It made me feel like I was on a yellow brick road straight to Oz. One more city. One more person. One more project. One more proof-of-concept that I was exceptional enough to outrun my own suffering.

The oscillations got bigger. What do you do when you realize something is off? You sprint in the opposite direction in denial. The summer of 2023 was non-stop travel that culminated in 48 hours of travel home from Japan, followed by a career fair in which I signed up for orchestra, ROTC, and 20 credits. Followed by a flight to Seattle after draining my bank account and maxing out my credit card. Looking back though, I can connect the dots from my childhood. I first got prescribed antidepressants when I was 17. I lied on the intake form for the virtual doctor and said I was 18. At first it made sense. I was coming off of covid, a church scandal where the pastor of Calvary had an affair with a singer, and getting into fights with my parents. The church scandal broke my worldview. I had a dad who would get mad at me for spilling a glass of milk, who had cameras in the house, and who secretly hid an AirTag deep in the car, under the tire in the trunk, wrapped in black duct tape. I had a dad who told me to drink bleach after tie-dyeing shirts with friends in the backyard and dumping the bleach in the alley because I didn't want to put it down the drain.

So I always clung to male figures in my life who I respected. I projected onto them what I wish my dad would have been. I would watch Arrow in 6th grade in the back of the bus after I had bought my first phone from my caddying money. Because I was raised Christian, I was never allowed to watch anything other than PBS, and I only listened to 98.5 KTIS. I first discovered rap music from the kids in the back of the bus who mostly lived in North Minneapolis. I discovered the DC universe when my cousin secretly showed me one night when she was visiting from Chicago. I was hooked from the first episode I watched of The Flash. So when I encountered the character of Oliver Queen, who was strong enough to survive anything, I latched on. I was convinced for years that my soccer coach was Oliver Queen. Every time I went to soccer practice, I imagined him as Oliver Queen. This vision morphed as I got older, but each time I would find a male role model, either real or fictional, and cling on for dear life. I obsessed over YouTubers, technologists, and self-help authors.

But when the pastor had an affair with the singer, my trust in male authority shattered. The singer had an angelic voice. I vividly remember standing behind her one day when I was 10, listening to her sing the songs at Calvary. I aspired to sing like her someday in the musicals I partook in, as well as the church choir. And then when the church split in half, I lost a lot of trust in the adults in my life. I took it upon myself to try to reunite the church. I poured through the ELCA bylaws to try to help resolve the conflict and bring about peace again, but my mom said no. My mom, as much as I love her, does not like conflict. In fact most of my childhood she diffused the arguments between my dad and me. My dad would yell at me, I would go in my room and cry, and a few hours later I would receive an apology from my dad after my mom talked to him. The cycle would repeat again and again, and at some point I gave up on both of them.

It was a perfect storm. I was convinced I needed to leave home. My nervous system had relished the structure of my childhood with two hours of sports every night, excelling at school, and leading the clubs and groups I was a part of. But at 16 it started to crumble. After 10th grade, I had both aced my four AP exams and made it to junior nationals for cross country skiing. I was on top of the world. I believed I could do anything. So I channeled my energy into leaving. I would buy a van, renovate it, and move to California. Why California? Because it was the Schelling point for all the characters in the biographies I read.

One particular evening in February was the final straw with my parents. I was 16 at the time, the winter after covid, and my dad had taken my SIM card out of my phone because I refused to go to church after the scandal. I had lost faith in God and religious institutions. I didn't want to go. It was around 7 PM on a frigid Thursday night in Minnesota; the temperature hovered around -5 degrees fahrenheit. I sat outside on the patio step, wearing a t-shirt, in an act of protest against the compromise of core values I was being asked to make. At the time I was in a political philosophy class and had been part of walkouts at school for gun violence, so I felt my protest was justified. I no longer felt compelled to sit through sermons, and refused to listen to my parents lecture me on why they felt that my belief system was wrong. I always carried with me an existential curiosity. Around the age of 12 I asked my youth leader if God acted as a puppet master, with all of us humans simply playing out our scripted role. I would later confront this question again in philosophy class 9 years later.

But the cookie started to crumble. I would sit on the floor of my room sobbing. Sobbing because I no longer trusted my parents, sobbing because I no longer trusted the adults in my life, and sobbing because I both knew how little power I held, and how much strength it would take to pull myself out of the situation I was in. At the time my parents chalked it up to teenage angst. But the depression started to creep in.

I have journal entries from 2021.

"Sometime my mom makes me want to run into a wall. She was about to not let me get my Covid-19 vaccine because I wasn't being obedient and practicing 'good Christian values' also she won't let me go to Partens In Pediatrics because she thinks she knows what's right. I want to be done with this, I despise my mom talking and her opinions. I don't appreciate the Minnesota weather, I don't appreciate having my money, medical, food, and living situation managed by my parents."

During my childhood my mom refused to vaccinate me. I had flown by myself to California right when I turned 15 because I didn't require a parent chaperone to do so. In Tahoe with my cousin, I was first exposed to the idea of why herd immunity and vaccination was important. I came back from that trip determined to be vaccinated. It was in these schisms that I slowly developed a quiet rage. Whether it was the rainbow background on my Apple Watch that my mom confronted me about because she thought it meant I was gay. It was in the prayers that there was something wrong with me and the arguments where I was labeled as irresponsible and disrespectful. As an only child it was always two on one, which never helped.

So I started antidepressants. But when my mom found out, she stopped them and found a Christian therapist for me instead. One day after expressing frustration around my ambitions the Christian therapist told me that I would have more time in heaven to accomplish my dreams. After that session I was done.

I poured myself into my escape plan. Once I realized that you needed an adult to co-sign a car purchase, I threw myself into getting into Harvard for cross country skiing. I read essays from the Harvard lawsuit, I watched all the YouTube videos I could find, and I wrote a research proposal to evaluate ferritin levels and endurance fatigue in female athletes. I applied for grants, started a chess club, and helped re-write the student council charter and get Eid added to our district calendar. As I pursued all these goals, sometimes frantically and sometimes with more intention than I could execute, I stumbled across the concept of Ikigai, which is to build your life at the intersection of what you love to do, what you're good at, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs. I knew I needed to build my skills in leadership and gain the education needed to understand the physical and molecular world. I identified my main passions: worldwide equity in unalienable rights, biology, and understanding human consciousness. But it wasn't enough. After months of back and forth with Chris City and a visit to Harvard to meet the team and coach, I was deferred. This sent me into a two week depression where I couldn't get out of bed, and I had no motivation to study. I withdrew from my PSEO classes, and started planning a new escape.

But even at this time, the signs of mania started to emerge.

"So it is currently 5:26 AM today and I didn't want to do a voice memo because I think writing it down is more effective because I never look back and listen to my voice memos. Right now I'm going to the gym and I have so much energy. I don't know why I have so much energy and I had a crazy dream last night. I was doing basically like parkour in super high train tunnels, like think Arcola High, but they were through the city so they're kind of dug underground and they were abandoned train tunnels. I need to go west, yeah. And I was doing parkour with all the soccer girls, which is really strange because they would never do anything I feel like that put their lives in danger, so it's a little bit scary actually. And then somehow my parents found out where we were and they were coming to find me. And the location is on 94, so it was 94 east. I'm somewhere like in Brooklyn Center, Brooklyn Park, which is really interesting that I had an exact location. And what else, oh yeah, and then I had a dream that night or something that P, or sorry M, was doing the same thing with her friend but there was doing it like a little bit scarier, and yeah that was my dream."

That is one of the cruelest things about bipolar. In the beginning it does not feel like destruction. It feels like revelation.

It feels like finally becoming yourself.

And when you are eighteen, or seventeen, or even sixteen, how are you supposed to know the difference between vision and illness? Between giftedness and instability? Between faith and delusion? Especially when the very same force that is destabilizing you is also making you feel more alive, more creative, more driven, and more certain than you ever have before?

And somewhere along the journey I started to confuse suffering with significance.

If I was in pain, it meant I cared.
If I was obsessive, it meant I was serious.
If I was sleep-deprived, it meant I was high energy.
If I was devastated, it meant I had given my best.
If I was spinning out, it meant I was capable of pushing beyond most people.

I understand most clearly now. I did not just want freedom. I wanted transcendence. I wanted to blast so far beyond the confines of my childhood, my family, Minnesota, religion, fear, and the terrifying smallness of being a girl with no power. I wanted no one to ever be able to put me back in the box I came from.

California symbolized that for me. So did Harvard. So did Berkeley. So did cross country skiing, startups, coding, hackathons, boys with grand visions, group chats full of plans, flights booked recklessly, and every city that made me feel like I was in motion.

Motion became my god.

If I was moving, I did not have to feel trapped.
If I was striving, I did not have to feel powerless.
If I was dreaming, I did not have to grieve.

But my biology caught up with me. I can see it looking backwards. The antidepressants at 17 pushed my bipolar brain into a spin. The spin made my nervous system more sensitive. The high of traveling Europe alone, moving to California, meeting new people, being wrapped up in the bubble of AI, meeting friends my age, and entering the social circle I so desperately craved in high school felt like a never ending Tootsie Roll. And then it came crashing down in March of 2023.

"Do you have a clue how badly I wanted to rip R's name tag off, cut the end off, burn it into mine? Do you know how much I wanted to make an anonymous blog and start a gossip page at warp for the memes? How much I wanted to throw a party on the last night of warp and get everyone dancing? Can you try to comprehend the desire I had to build a cloud chamber, code the Stroop test, set up an orienteering course, go on treadmill runs, run a stable marriage pairing social experiment, make a music video with GPT-3 generated lyrics for warp, make a watch with a touch screen user interface with four additional physical buttons to time-track, play capture the flag with secret social rules, and get all the way through linear algebra and coding? Instead I woke up every morning with a voice yelling at me that I didn't have the motivation to get up, that I was thinking too hard, that I already got enough sleep so I should get up, but that I felt stressed out... I mean, who was I anyways, compared to these cool people? They all had things to talk about, and nothing that I'd done in the past could come to mind. And these social interactions, I didn't want to mess them up, and it seemed like other people had conversation flow so easily, and me, well I probably wasn't optimizing the conversations like I should. And someone told me to talk to R, so I did. But the words couldn't come, and I felt myself spiraling, like I've never had this much trouble socializing before, and instead I was wondering if I was presenting myself with coherent thoughts, and I slowly felt the doors to access my creative ideas closing, and I wanted to crawl in a hole and cry. And then I felt rage, slowly creeping up through my chest, and I've never felt this feeling before. I was around so many cool people, and I felt the most isolated, misunderstood, and debilitated that I've ever felt in my life. It feels like life decided to throw me in the headlights, and I froze. I couldn't escape the loop of meta-thoughts. The next day would come around and I'd wake up and realize that the next day would come around and I would wake up and I would think about the next day coming around and my lack of ability to wake up, and by this point I felt like I spent too much mental energy thinking about this, so I would think about my list of tasks for the day, and I 1) had a meeting at 12 I needed to edit a video for, and 2) I had a job I was supposed to be doing, and 3) should I go back to California or stay in Texas? 'Oh shoot, I'm going to miss class if I don't start working on the video now, because it'll probably take me an hour to edit it, but I probably also need 10 minutes to jump out of bed, put on clothes, and run there, so I only have 50 minutes. But hey, 50 minutes is better than nothing, but my computer is back in big ELC so I'd need to get up and put my clothes on now and edit the video there.' And then I stop to think for a second and realize how anxious I feel. 'Maybe I need a break,' I think. Rob, Alex, and I didn't meet last week, and I'm still at warp, so surely they'll understand if I don't edit the video today... I guess I'll sleep for thirty more minutes... and the loop reruns. For eight more days, until I realize that if I keep this up I might break, and I throw in the towel. So now I'm left in defeat, and it feels like it's just me and my anxious thoughts, wallowing in this pool of depression."

And the oscillations got bigger from there until I reached a breaking point. I planned my dream spring break trip. Camping on Angel Island, sleeping in a Model Y in Marin, and a trip down the coast to Big Sur to attend Easter mass with my aunt. But when I was on Angel Island for my delayed birthday celebration with myself, I felt the numbness that signals the start of a depressive episode. It flipped so quickly. That morning I had been dancing in South Park, confidently walking down the SF streets to get to Target, excitedly telling my coworkers about my camping plans during standup. But on the ferry as I felt my demeanor shift, I knew that something was off. I subconsciously realized my worst fear; this was my dream vacation, with no stressors, and somehow the floor dropped beneath me with no warning. If this could happen in California, it could happen anywhere. I panicked. I camped on Angel Island, sat at one of the most beautiful beaches in the Bay looking out at the city and felt nothing. I tried to calm my nervous system by laying on the beach and letting the waves lap in and out, but the moment I started hiking back up to the campsite, the feeling came back. In the afternoon, when I was back in San Francisco, I hid in the nap room at the office. I didn't want to move and I craved darkness. I knew something was horribly wrong. I called my mom and my cousin and eventually booked a flight home for the next morning. And so here I am. Back in Minnesota after I swore I'd stay here indefinitely two months ago. One manic episode later. And now fully surrendering to the bipolar. I've seen the pattern too many times now, seen how horrible the depression is, and how chaotic and destructive the manias are. I now know that however much I try to outrun it, it will always come back to me unless I stabilize. So I sit on the couch, I sleep a lot, I play chess, and I write. In the hope that over the next couple of months I can figure this out.

But until that happens, I am learning a different kind of courage.

Not the courage of booking the flight, or making the grand plan, or throwing myself headfirst into another city, another person, another dream. I know that kind of courage well. It has carried me across oceans and into rooms I once only fantasized about. It has given me stories, friends, wonder, and moments so electric I thought my chest might split open from gratitude and split open from agony. But it has also burned me. Again and again.

So now I am trying to learn the courage of staying.

Staying in one place long enough to let my nervous system unclench. Staying alive through the flatness, through the grief, through the humiliation of admitting that I cannot outwit my own biology. Staying with the ordinary rhythms of a life that does not announce itself as spectacular. Waking up. Taking the meds. Eating breakfast. Texting a friend back. Organizing laundry. Letting a day be just a day instead of a referendum on whether my life matters.

This is much harder for me than boarding a plane to Europe alone at eighteen. Harder than filing for a restraining order. Harder than pitching a crazy idea, rallying people around it, and willing something into existence through sheer force of hope. Because the hardest thing for me has never been movement. It has been stillness. It has been accepting that peace is not empty just because it is quiet.

For so long I thought the point of life was to be effervescent. To squeeze every possible flavor out of existence. To become someone so alive, so accomplished, so extraordinary that no one could ever reduce me to the frightened girl crying on the floor of her childhood bedroom. I thought if I just kept going, kept building, kept loving intensely enough, kept chasing beauty hard enough, I could outrun the darkness that kept stalking me.

But bipolar has humbled me in a way nothing else could.

It has forced me to confront the reality that there is no finish line where I become immune to myself. No city where I magically stop crashing. No relationship that can love me out of my own nervous system. No amount of achievement that makes me exempt from the simple, repetitive labor of caring for a sick brain.

But if I stop trying to turn every feeling into a prophecy, every coincidence into a sign, every high into a calling, then maybe I can finally begin to live inside my life instead of constantly lunging beyond it. Maybe I can stop worshipping the edge. Maybe I can stop confusing suffering with depth. Maybe I can stop measuring my worth by how much I can endure.

I do not mean small in a sad way. I mean small like a candle protected from the wind. I think that is what I am after now. Not transcendence. Not escape. Not some magnificent proof that all my chaos was secretly genius. Just enough stability to hear my own thoughts without them turning into a stampede. Enough peace to enjoy the people I love without making them responsible for saving me. Enough discipline to choose the long game over the thrilling one.

Because I am starting to understand that healing is not glamorous. It is not cinematic. It does not look like standing on a cliff with the wind in your hair as the soundtrack swells. It looks like turning down invitations. Canceling plans. Withdrawing from classes. It is in going to bed on time. Eating healthy food. Choosing to stay alive.

I do not know what happens next. I do not know how many months it will take before I trust my mind again. I do not know whether the future version of me will live in California or Minnesota or somewhere I cannot yet imagine. I do not know which dreams were mine and which belonged to the illness. I do not know how to separate the girl from the fire completely.

Still here after all the flights, all the crashes, all the nights of terror, all the mornings of dread, all the false starts and grand plans and humiliating collapses. Still here after trying to construct a self out of movement. Still here after seeing, over and over, how quickly a beautiful thing can tip into something dangerous.

Still here.
And for now, that has to be enough.

Maybe one day I will look back on this chapter with clean lines and perfect language and be able to explain exactly what happened. Maybe I will be able to pin it down neatly: the childhood, the church, the escape velocity, the first antidepressants, the first clear mania, the first devastating crash, the final surrender. But I am writing this from inside it, while the paint is still wet, while the clock is still ticking but this time with the intention of defusing the bomb instead of loading it with gasoline.

But I want to make it clear that this isn't me giving up or wasting my potential. If anything, it's fueled me my whole life thus far as a superpower in some ways, and now I recognize it. Which means I'm able to tame it. I've got my eyes on a combined MD and PhD program at the University of Minnesota. I still want to help people. That's always been the goal. I still want to build nanorobots. I still want to understand the brain and help all people with a mood disorder. It's what I've dedicated my life to. And now, once I can calm the storm, I'll be able to continue on that quest. And in the meantime, I'm letting the storm pass, and working towards my steady state.

I'm sitting on a mossy covered wooden bench set atop a mild cliff on a cove across from Angel Island. Inscribed in it is a quote by Rumi which reads "When the Ocean comes to you as a lover marry at once, quickly for godsakes! Existence has no better gift." It's 10:02 AM and the sun is shining down on my face, it feels as if this moment was meant to be, a divine gift amidst the chaotic life I've been living for the past few years.

I've always been drawn to the water. It could be because I was born in March, and my birth sign is Pisces, but I don't believe in astrology, so I think it has to do with the rhythmic randomness of the waves and their constructive and destructive nature. It's something about the vastness of bodies of water, that can absorb the chaos and anxiety I've carried. The ocean symbolizes the divine or true, selfless love that is boundless, unlike the fleeting, self-serving love of the world. I grew up near a park on the east side of Crystal lake, and often I would approach the rocks on the water around sunset and listen to the waves lap at my feet. In the winter when it was too cold, I would drive down to the park at night and sit with my window open and the heat blasting. It was during these quiet moments in high school where I would reflect on my goals, the direction I wanted to go in life, and my heart's desires.

It makes sense then, that when I did end up moving to California at 18, Muir Beach became my safe haven. I've brought Mila, my best friend, there, along with a handful of other friends and every time I dive in, it feels like I'm baptized again in the peace that only the ocean can bring. Sutro Baths and Baker beach are other of my favorite spots, watching the moon on the waves as they crash in and out, lighthouse beams shining off in the distance.

I've been wrestling with what I want out of life since I was 16, when I skied 50km into West Yellowstone on a quest to meet Old Faithful. At the time, all I wanted out of life was to escape Minnesota. It felt like I was the main character in a video game, ready to start her quest, but instead I was shackled to a stake forced to look out and dream about what could be out there. West Yellowstone provided a glimpse of what the world apart from my parents and home could feel like. And for the past 6 years, that's what I've been chasing.

I'm brought back to my senior year of high school, when me and my group of friends from my club ski team would sneak out at 10 PM onto the ski jump hill at the top of Theodore Wirth park and careen down the hill, up to five or six of us on the sled. In some ways it feels like I've been in a continual tumble down a hill since 2020.

I've had a chaotic past few years to say the least. It started in June of 2022 when I was 18 and left home to backpack Europe. A theme of my manias is urgency, I both thrive in, and fall apart from the stress; it's a fine line. I traveled to 9 countries and built a basis for the future of my adventures for the next nearly four years. I then moved straight to California, and met people running hackathons, coding cage free chicken sites, and writing articles for teenagers about how CPUs and AI work— a sharp contrast to the inertia I had been met with at my high school in Minnesota when I wanted to produce a film about how the cities' recycling process, write a research grant for biodigestable cafeteria food, and do research on why adolescent endurance female athletes consistently lack ferritin storage from cross country skiing.

I've held the belief that we as humans, with one life, are meant to explore. In a world where some people have access to five metaphorical ice cream flavors— which college they go to, what entrepreneurial ventures they could scrape together or join, what jobs they have access to, how far they can travel, how much food they can try— some have access to twenty because they know about the shop down the block, and the friend next door with a couple more flavors. I believe that to have a complete life, you have to go out and try them all. In life, resources certainly put you ahead of the curve in some respects, but at some level every human being has to make the choice for themselves as to how far they want to explore, how many samples of emotion they want to taste, and how deeply. It's not all highs, I've failed spectacularly too. I was depressed and twenty pounds overweight by my twentieth birthday in March of 2023. Although I was producing a lot— running alignment jams, retreats, coding my own games, organizing trips for my friends, and boxing a couple times a week— I was spiritually lost. I had forgotten my values and what state of feeling I was searching for internally. It all hit me in the spring of 2023 at a rationality camp in Texas. I was physically trying to run away from the camp, towards the perimeter, and I kept running up along the perimeter wall. I wanted so desperately to feel free, but we were miles away from the nearest city and the entire camp was enclosed by a chain link fence. It's how I felt internally at the time too. I was waking up, showing up to my job, attempting to feel something, to no avail. So I tried to patch it up, to keep traveling, first back to Minnesota for a month, where I got rejected by UCSD at the end of March. Then back to California, and then I spent a summer flying all around the world. Europe with friends where I wrapped up my internship in Dublin, then Minnesota, then out to Vermont and New Hampshire, then back to San Francisco to move out, then back to Vermont for Outernet, and then Japan for Hackuba. It was a whirlwind and during all of it I was spinning out of control. September of 2023 was a major crash. The culmination of a multi-month long crusade, the Enchantments in Seattle were the final pit stop where the wheels totally fell off.

But ultimately that didn't stop me. It did hinder me quite a bit— moving all of my items out of my dorm room the day after I flew home in defeat, skipping out on my freshman fall, going months with my parents being the only two humans I interacted with, if even them. But in the winter of 2023 and the start of 2024 I found new jobs, I fell madly in love and went on a road trip to Colorado a few days after meeting a boy at work. I joined Air Force ROTC for all of 2024. It was an exercise in discipline, community, and excellence. I joined i5 Space and created the first chatbot in any ROTC branch. I did freelance work for the first time in 2024 and explored what it was like to build a product for someone directly. I backpacked in Tahoe with my best friend and boyfriend, and visited California again two more times that summer. I spent January of 2025 in California. I ran a group trip with thirty of my friends to Big Sur, skied in Tahoe for New Year's, and built a custom Windows era inventory system for my cousin's art gallery in Carmel. And then suddenly it all came crashing down again. I broke up with the person I had spent nearly every day with in 2024, I was kicked out of ROTC for my peanut allergy, and eventually tore my ACL in April. But there was so much good too, getting 3rd place at the Fowler Social Global Innovation competition at my school, celebrating my birthday in March in California with my best friends, visiting Colorado as the result of a canceled Space Force conference, and attending the Creator Camp film festival in Austin.

Love —and the absence of it— is the reoccurring motif. Love for my friends, for my family, for adventure, for the cats. Falling down, getting up, falling down, getting up, falling down, and getting up. At some point it does become exhausting. But at this point I kept going. Taco Bell HQ, the Tesla diner, cheering for my friends in the SF marathon, and then another mania. Back to San Francisco for a week, a night going out alone in Minneapolis, lots of nights crying alone in my bed. A burst of joy after getting 3rd at HackMIT with an amazing team, and then another crash. A camera roll filled with screenshots of Clash Royale games, screenshots from old iMessage conversations, and assorted 0.5s— running at Lifetime, a night dancing, or an adventure to the hot tub in below zero temperatures.

But my four years of careering down the hill that started when I left Minnesota for the first time at 18 began to come a stop. Like HAL's consciousness slowly degrading as Bowman removed the modules one-by-one in a 2001 Space Odyssey, so did my quilt of dreams. I had to cancel the first ever trip of my entire life in the November of 2025 because for the first time ever in my life I wanted to kill myself. I'm not sure if it was the result of watching Midsommar a couple of months beforehand, or because I could see that if I kept on this path— the one of constantly performing: running trips, winning competitions, pushing myself to output a manufactured life at the cost of my own daily happiness— I was going to implode. In fact I did implode. I had to fly my friends to Minnesota to feel like I was deserving of happiness through fostering human connection— the one thing I felt I still knew how to do. And yet after finals ended, I pushed myself even harder. Was it recklessness, or the epiphany I had that I could completely ruin my life so that I would be forced to stay in Minnesota and burn everything to the ground so that I could truly start over?

It's possible I never know. Maybe in four years I'll be able to look back and retrospect on why I booked a two week trip to Europe as a last hurrah. Why I flew to SF and rented an ostentatious orange Jeep for my last week in the city, and went to Yosemite with my dear friends for the hell of it in spite of willingly climbing into debt. Why I planned a goodbye party with the designs that had gotten me through the fall, disguised as a clothing launch. And why after traveling for eight weekends in a row— Amsterdam, Paris, SF, back to SF after a week of work, DC, Treehacks, and finally Buildfest, the Universe had the irony to curse me with a peanut allergy attack, the first one since I was 5 months old. But for now I won. I did it. I finally nerfed myself. I've deferred my SF marathon registration, and my LEGOLAND admission, and plan to do so for as many years needed until I feel stable.

As I'm sitting outside of Wolfe Alumni Hall, on a sunny winter day in Minnesota finishing this story as St. Thomas's first 24 hackathon chugs along, a girl is playing piano and singing in the foyer. It's not perfect, but it's beautiful. It's an intentional stab of love, of beauty, in an otherwise quiet world. As I lay in my bed on the night of February 21st while my stomach tore itself apart hours before the ER visit, I watched the videos of Alysa Liu skating in her final routine. In a pained double-epi penned state, it dawned on me that I would aim to strive to feel like that on a daily basis, for as long as it took me to get there. The only way to escape the suffering is through carving your path, it can be a path of adventure, of wild dreams, or it can be a path of peace, and calm. Last night, on the 23rd, I watched the Jessie Diggins documentary, Threshold, and it really resonated with me. For so long I was trying to prove that I matter, that I have inherent value through the achievements I accomplish, the people I know, the places I've been, and the projects I'm working on. But really, for a long time I just wanted to feel accepted, to be seen fully, in all my chaos and intensity, and loved, not judged. I want peace. No more hackathons, no more travel, just a consistent schedule. Waking up slowly, building happiness and joy into my own life. It's okay to be stuck. It's okay to be overwhelmed. But you lose by failing to try, and giving into what society, and your peer group tells you that you should do. If you eat the same ice cream flavor your whole life, the unquenchable desire to at least see what you're missing will always be there. But if you optimize for eating ice cream, you lose the ability to sit in the moment with a single lick. And maybe being able to sit with appreciation over a single lick of ice cream, or the gentle lap from the ocean, was the point the whole time.

By the way, the venture capital and innovation scene in Minnesota is not dead, far from it. I plan to give my roots a chance to grow here. I want to seek the warmth of friends, and the peace that comes from walking in the light, in Minnesota. I want to help the people around me: the homeless, tutor those who I can, and volunteer more. I want to nourish my body— with exercise, with healthy food, with positive music, and wisdom from books and people.

I often think about all the ways I have failed. I think about the ideas I've had: a video game called the Fisherman's Curse about a girl who falls from the sky and has to journey to Lake Chabot to heal herself, laser tag on Angel Island, implementing an efficient routing feature in the Target app, a retreat in Tahoe for my friends, the surfing trip I couldn't find the strength in me to board the plane for. I think about the money I have spent recklessly, plane tickets, campsites, clothes, items that I haven't used: a USB message in a bottle, the Gamma mini synth stuck in its packaging in San Francisco, and a rave outfit.

I believe this provides some insight as to where my life is headed. I'm no longer chasing intoxicating highs: codependent love, reckless dopamine chasing, and experiences to placate and numb the wildfire in my brain. I'm reading The Life Impossible by Matt Haig right now, and my life is a little bit like that of Grace's in Ibiza. I don't know why I was dealt the hand I was. I don't know why I grew up where I did, have had the experiences I have had, or met the people I have met. All I can do is—through trial and error—figure out the type of person I want to be, make the impact that I can, and keep fighting towards the light and sharing it with the world and those around me. Whether that's through music, art, writing, or just showing up and asking about the cinnamon buns in the older lady's cart next to me at the checkout in HyVee.