4.

Was looking through my hard drive to find some videos for fandom (hahaha what else is a priority in my life at the moment) and fell into this nostalgic spiral of looking through my exchange videos and Snapchat stories and missing all of that –

The freedom of travelling and thrill of discovering a new town where you are anonymous and free to only have yourself as company. Lessons at UT, the campus, my professors, HEB, my bike, the Austin buses that have actual bike racks, feeling driven and excited for class everyday, feeling responsible enough for my own life to cook my own meals, feeling truly independent.

What a coincidence that it’s been exactly 4 years since the day I left Singapore for exchange.

Retracing my identity over the past few years has been difficult, since I’ve unfortunately fallen out of habit of diarying, and words just have a unique ability to capture a state of mind that is unparalleled to me (well, at least until I become more eloquent in visuals). But regardless I would attribute a lot of who am I today to have been seeded during exchange, in UT, be it my career choices, travel habits, body image perception/fashion choices, or accepting neutrality as an alright state of being (I guess?).

And it upsets me that at the current moment, I do not even have the luxury of fantasising that I could return there for a masters.

But the world will keep on changing, and I shall not write anything off just yet.

Plenty of other things I want to talk about, but shall save those for when I’m awake at a more godly hour.