shorter of breath &
one day closer to death

08/17/2025 9:58 PM

i've been workin on this post for a while. it's been something i've been thinking about a lot lately, but only able to process my thoughts on in small chunks. a couple months ago -- or at least, a couple months from when i started writing this -- marked something of a milestone for me, something i'd been worried about for a long time. it marked ten years since i graduated college in May 2015.

it's hard for me to wrap my head around. i remember those years so vividly, & the immediate years after i graduated. i worked so hard in college, in transferring to a university that i thought i'd be happier in. so i'd meet more people & expland my horizons or something. i had so many dreams & ideas about who i was & who i wanted to be.

those first few years after i had graduated, i felt so aimless, so drifting. a recurring thought i had was that i was wasting my time, that the longer it took me to get my footing or find what i was supposed to do, then do it, the fewer chances i would have to accomplish... whatever it was i was trying to accomplish. i remember even back in 2017/2018 feeling like i was running out of time. but what was i running toward, or from?

i recently found some blog posts i'd written during those first few years after college. here are some of my favorite quotes from my past self:

"It appears that I haven't updated my blog since December. What's worse, the last thing I wrote about was how I was going through a breakup. That's embarrassing. Well, I'm feeling a lot better since I wrote that. I think it was an all-around good learning experience for me." - May 2017

"Back in October, my lighted vanity mirror finally died. I've had it since I was like 16 or 17. The light bulbs finally all went out and won't turn on anymore. It kind of made me sad. I've had it for around ten years. My mom gave it to me as a birthday present, and thinking about my mom makes me sad. So many of my mornings have started out with the faint hum of electricity as I turned it on and stared at my face staring back at me. I've replaced the mirror since then, but I still feel weirdly sentimental about its passing." - January 2018

"There's always a few moments when I go into my old bedroom where I feel like I have to hold my breath. It's almost like a museum exhibit dedicated to the person I was between the ages of 15 to 22: The hilariously edgy Heath Ledger The Dark Knight poster. The pegasus kite pinned on my wall after a day of flying kites from my senior year of high school. The dusty PlayStation 2. The actual goddamn photo strips with friends taken at the mall. The small statue of Hedwig my dad gave to me on my 10th birthday, the year the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone movie came out. All of these moments caught in time, perfectly preserved, like how bereaved parents in movies and TV keep the rooms of their dead children as untouched shrines.

Only I'm not dead, just different. The Rachel who hung The Cure's iconic "Boys Don't Cry" and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness posters on her walls-- The Rachel who had a shelf dedicated to her My Little Pony collection and also decorated with H. R. Giger prints-- The Rachel who has an entire section of wall dedicated to the notes, post cards, and small baubles friends gifted her-- those Rachels are still me.

The Rachel who spent so many hours in that room still exists inside me. All of her pain and loneliness, all of her fear, but her passion and fire too." - December 2016

"Which brings me to another point-- I graduated college two years ago. That's bizarre. I've been out of college... two years. Two whole years. Part of me feels really bad about it. I still have these vestigial ideas of what "success" means deep inside my brain, and those images are from decades past when people were able to graduate from college without being weighed down by a mountain of debt and somehow found an entry-level full-time job in their field within six months. UHHH??? Yeah, that hasn't happened. Not by a long shot. I often feel down about myself and how I'm not living up to these arbitrary standards of "success" I have. I get all mean to myself and say things like, 'What have you done in two years?'" - May 2017

i noticed a central theme in my writing throughout my life is my anxiety about time, my fear of wasting time or ending up in the future not knowing how'd got there. this is something i've dealt with my whole life, for as long as i can remember. i've started calling it my "time anxiety," but i think it's also existential dread. but calling it that sounds a little pretentious, i think. regardless of whatever i call it, i've always been trying to find a way to describe it to people, to see if they understand what i'm talking about. they either have no idea what i'm talking about, or they know it far too well.

the best way i can try to explain the feeling is that it feels like i've lost something i can never get back. and i've been feeling this dread my entire life. a clear example that i remember from my teen years is one summer in 2006, when i was 14. i went on this walk with my dad & it was just a really fun time, one of those moments that seems really special to you as a kid, even though you're not sure why. i remember writing about that night in my journal, about all the conversations i had with my dad. but then i eventually i realized that ten days had passed from that night, & i got really anxious.

i got so sad about ten days having passed, that i asked my dad if ten days is a long time. lol. it's still hard for me to explain. i think at the time, i was also anxious about summer vacation coming to an end, & i realized that ten days had slipped by. & that's just a microcosm of this larger issue i have, where i'm always kind of scared or worried about the passage of time.

i've been spending a lot of time thinking about why i feel this ever-present dread. what parts of it is mental illness, & which parts are trauma? which parts are just "memento mori" & which parts are rumination? i guess it's like, i get sad when i think about how things have changed. like if 23-year old Rachel could somehow know that even though Art Angels was a really good album in 2015, but by 2025 Grimes was now like fascist-adajacent or whatever. i get sad when i think about what 23 year-old Rachel would feel if she knew that Neil Gaiman would be outed as a serial rapist in 2024. i get sad about a lot of things. i don't like thinking about what Rachel in 2015 would feel if she knew that in 2025, i would see that the president has secret police who are kidnapping people & we're watching it on our phones & we can't do anything. i don't know. i don't like the idea of my fresh-faced college grad self knowing that my sister & parents would die by the time i had turned 31. it's fucked up.

i've talked to my therapist a lot about this. i think a lot of this stuff is due to trauma & other fun things to talk about like that. i know that part of the reason why i feel like time slips by me is the ADHD & the dissociation. i've been working hard on curbing my dissociation habits. meditating has been super helpfl for that. i'm really proud of myself for having built up a consistent meditation habit. i do it every day now, sometimes twice daily. i really like using the game Playne to meditate, but you don't need a game or app to meditate if you want to start meditating yourself. i've become somewhat of an evangelist for meditating.

i hope that as i continue to meditate & focus on my mental health, i will be able to be more "present." i would like to spend less time focusing on the past or worrying about the future. i would like to be in the present moment & be okay with that.

as of a couple days ago, i learned that my site has turned one year old. hooray for me!!

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