“Letter to yourself 5-1-26” rewrite for Seminar class,
This is the rational brain writing.
I am writing to you from my desk, in my room, starting at 18:06 (now it’s 18:07, how coincidental is that?) on 2026 May 4. I should have written this letter earlier (the post would have taken it sooner had I done so) but ça ne fait rien, I’m writing now. I felt like writing because I was thinking about you recently (self-reflection and Seminar class) and had some things to say.
Half of me is disappointed. But even that thought assumes that my emotions can be cleanly divided into fractions, which they can’t, really. It’s more of a general mix. Think of a mutt—you can’t say it’s 50% Golden Retriever, 25% Labrador, 25% mutt. That’s how I feel. Ambivalent. Rather I should say that the forefront emotion I have towards you now is disappointment, because I know you’re capable of doing better. Like when you submitted the assignment (can’t remember which by now) to Mr. Davis three weeks late because of spring break and he still accepted it because you reached out and were honest. Same thing with the Personal Argument Outline for the debate. Or the Harkness prep you had to do just last week, which you forgot to do, and luckily saved yourself from needing by being extemporaneous during the actual Harkness and being able to connect points rapidly. Half-assing your work (or just…not doing it on time and accepting the late deductions) might work now (and in all fairness, it isn’t, really), but as difficulty increases and as teachers get less forgiving, they’ll just give you grades that reflect your effort.
Then again, I’m not too hard on you right now, because I know what’s happening. It’s 9th grade, it’s the adjustment year, seasonal depression mit solitude, the like. The good thing about it is that you’re putting that into a productive form and shaping it, so that someone else can benefit from it. The website for example, you coded that in like four days. And look at what it has on it—poems, essays (which you’ve been writing more of recently), videos, etc. You can clearly put in the effort when you want to, and you not doing that is what frustrates me.
But at the same time I don’t want you to be a robot. We both know that you could just—go to school, accept group work command, work in group, produce slideshow, complete worksheet, turn in, eat lunch, read, annotate, satisfy the grades, play the game. You know, the type of advice well-meaning teachers give. And if you tried that seriously it would make you lose everything that’s you, and I think it would destroy you in the process, because those well-meaning teachers are not you.
I was happy to hear about your This I Believe poem earlier in the year. That’s another example of putting things into productive forms. I read it and my eyes were just wide for a while and I drank some water and I thought. And I thought about thinking thoughts because you thought those thoughts and verbalised, transcribed, them onto the paper, and I looked at myself from a while, like from a vantage point, and thought I saw myself thinking those thoughts. And for so long it felt like I didn’t exist.
Similar thing with the bioethics debate and you being the only winning con-stem cell team. You worked with what you had even though in the beginning you thought about “cashing in a favour” and asking to be switched to the pro-team. And it paid off in real-time, what with the probing question and editing the other people’s drafts.
I guess if I had to boil it down to one sentence, I actually wouldn’t, because that wouldn’t be able to capture everything I feel. When you’re motivated, you work aussitôt and you make an experience in a frighteningly short amount of time that makes people feel something and you share it to me and I feel something deeper about it and I never tell you much about it because what’s really the point of telling you about it since you already know how I feel about it and you feel that what I feel ne fait rien in the grand scheme of things and probably wouldn’t help your self-esteem because you’ll still act weird about it and general other things in public or mit familia and all this recursiveness is proof of what I’m saying even if you don’t think it is because I just don’t stop writing until the thought process is over. When you’re unmotivated, the sentences are declarative filler, which shows that you don’t ultimately prize it much or feel like working through it and shaping it to your liking because you don’t feel like it’s worth your attention, which one could argue is not condescension, but rather an inability of the senses and sensibilities to mingle with others’ senses and sensibilities in a sensible way.
I’m not going to give you any advice, because that would just be a meaningless gesture, since we both know you won’t follow it, not out of dissatisfaction with it but from an assumed helplessness with changing your ways.
All this to say, go eat something. ♦