The Zigzag

Evolve (v), to develop gradually, especially from a simple to a more complicated form. Oxford Dictionary.

There’s a key word missing here. ‘Progress.’ 

Many associate human evolution with Zallinger’s The Road to Homo Sapien (1965), a procession from our earliest ancestor to the modern homo sapien. Admittedly, I do too. My mind skips past the theories I learned in school and flashes to this infamous illustration. It’s based on the Orthogenesis model that frames human evolution as a linear progression toward a defined goal. 

Zallinger’s The Road to Homo Sapien (1965).

But it’s quite the opposite. For many evolutionary biologists, ‘progress’ is also absent from their definitions. In a 2013 Harvard Gazette article, evolution is described as the “ultimate tinkerer, always having to make do with the parts on hand. Its creations tend to be imperfect, just fit enough to survive.” 

To evolve is to adapt. To struggle through the harshness of change, confusion, and loss. To learn from new obstacles and find temporary solutions to temporary issues. It’s less of a straight line and more of a…zigzag

The people who’ve dedicated their entire lives to understanding evolution are telling us point blank. It’s not the perfectly calculated actions that have gotten us to where we are as human beings. Yet, we’re fixated on Zallinger’s drawing. On antiquated and discredited interpretations. We’ve internalized a false sense of what growth looks like and used it as a metric for our own lives.

I often get caught up in a rejection-reinvention cycle. I’d say most of us do. Throughout our lives, we feel an intense desire to hold on to the past. Whether it’s past realities we lived, or past versions of imagined futures that never came to be. With this, comes an intense self-rejection. We’re taught to repress this desire for the past, as we’re reminded of the supposed line of progress our ancestors followed. The one we need to uphold in order to advance as individuals and as a species. We’re socialized to reinvent ourselves by moving forward without looking back.

But again, as evolutionary biologists have told us, progress isn’t linear. Progress, as we think of it, doesn’t even exist. So, the reinvention is shortly followed by an intrinsic rejection we feel as a symptom of repressing our core need to use the past as a tool for shaping our present. 

If you were to map out your own drawing of yourself a la Zallinger, from birth to now, you’d see. All the versions of yourself. The plummets and ascensions. The despairs and joys. Already, you’ve cycled through these possibilities of yourself, in no particular order. And throughout your lifetime, you’ll experience evolution in infinite ways.

Your identity will evolve. Your emotions will evolve. Your body will evolve.  Your dreams, fears, pains, joys, will evolve. Your relationships with others will evolve. Your relationship with yourself will evolve. Your understanding of the past will evolve. Your vision of the future will evolve. Your journey will evolve. You will evolve. And you won’t do it by going from A to Z. It’ll be ups, downs, plateaus, again and again. 

Despite our failure or refusal to accept this inherit non-linear pattern of evolution, we’ll still experience it. We’re biologically programmed to. To struggle. To learn. To adapt. To zigzag.

Peaceful Piano on Spotify

324 songs with 6,165,215 listeners. To me, music is one of the deepest forms of intimacy. Letting you be both accompanied and alone. Asking that you surrender yourself to it wholly, with no expectations. Evoking a stillness that is the core of what is beautiful in this world.

Soft raindrops that trickle their way down the windowsill. The light that lives in the crevices of blinds. Coffee grinds and freshly cut grass before a morning drive. The exchange of the sun’s goodbye and the moon’s hello. When one exists in an eruption of light with its hues of pinks, oranges, and yellows. And the other, in a lavender-blue embrace that engulfs you in a brisk breeze. The warmth of a familiar space that sings you to sleep.

But stillness doesn’t ask for our permission.

It seeps into our lives unapologetically. Like if someone suddenly hit your brakes after you’ve gone miles and miles in full speed without even a warning. Now you’re stopped at the traffic light at the end of a familiar road. The GPS recalculates. Cars zoom past you. Some, lag far behind. And others, stopped beside you.

Only hours till one year since lockdown. This year has felt like an infinite instant. A momentary lapse in a boundless pool of possibility. My emotions swell for the first time in months. They dissipate and remain in an in-between state.

In the stage I’ve been living in. Stopped at the traffic light. In between places, ideas, dreams, emotions. In between versions of me. The one behind who drives on the familiar road. And the one ahead who I haven’t met, but who feels like an old friend.

But stillness rewards us when we sit with it.

Today, I’m sitting. Alone with this instrumental indulgence. Accompanied by 6,165,215 other listeners. Comforted by these words I type that I didn’t know I had.

Sit with me. In stillness, together.

Finding Clarity in an IKEA Desk

I spent an hour cleaning a whiteboard yesterday. The bulk of it scraping off engraved dry erase marker (signed messages from my cousins that served as souvenirs for when they returned to Buenos Aires). For 11 years the messages co-existed as memories alongside an amalgamation of creations on the whiteboard panel of my paper white ‘Micke’ IKEA desk.

The desk found its home with me in middle school. Aside from the written souvenirs, I decorated the board with stickers and magnets. It was also the place that housed our family DELL desktop, on which I’d make music videos to 2000’s pop songs, chat with friends online, and write music during my american-idol-inspired-me-to-be-a-singer-songwriter phase (Too good to share online, sorry).

It then followed me to the first room of my own in a new house. Where I started to figure out life as a sleep-deprived high schooler. There, the writing on the board increased. More stickers and magnets joined. Glossy Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar editorials paired with saturated magazine scraps emerged. Throughout high school, the desk was my space to create. A space to dream, explore, and workshop all my creative musings. Where I could collect my thoughts and contemplate all the possibilities of what could be. What I could be.

When we moved to a new house at the end of my Senior year and I left for college, its magic faded. It became a neglected storage space in the corner of my room. Sitting down at the desk to create was replaced by the unfortunate pile-of-clothes-on-the-chair routine. But in the momentary crevices of visits home, I’d find comfort in its nostalgia. Later, during my last quarter of college, it kept me productive enough to complete my university remotely with the backdrop of a relentless pandemic.

And finally, yesterday. I find myself erasing the messages, tearing off the magazine collage, peeling off the stickers, and removing the magnets. When I was done with the board, I moved on to the rest of my desk. In two hours I’d cleared the board and redid the desk with stored decor from my room and garage. Mementos for so many moments. Chatting with middle school crushes on Facebook messenger. Blogging on Tumblr at 3 AM with a 7 AM start time the next day. Journaling my 5-year-plan as a junior in high school (spoiler: didn’t follow it). Late night study sessions. Restful and Restless nights. Two moves. Three houses. And so much more.

I credit my fascination with change (hence the name of this project), to my complicated relationship with it.  You can probably blame all my Taurus placements, but usually once I’ve arranged something in my room I stick to it until I absolutely need to change it or, I ~reluctantly~ replace it with something more fitting to my lifestyle/aesthetic. So scrapping my familiar whiteboard set-up without an intention set was unexpected. But like other moments when I’ve impulsively felt inspired to activate change (again, it’s a complicated relationship and I’ll be expanding on it), this was cathartic. Melancholic and revitalizing, it felt like the manifestation of a clean slate. Or in this case, a clean whiteboard. 

Erasing the messages on the board took time, a ton of clorox wipes, and scratching out the almost-tattooed ink with a cottonless q-tip. Even then, the ink didn’t completely fade. While most of the writing is gone, if you squint hard enough, you’ll see a few letters. You’ll also see some residual tape marks. Cleaning out the board didn’t erase the fact that the writing, magazine collages, magnets, and stickers were part of it for so long, or their remnants. Similarly, moving on to another chapter doesn’t erase the existence of the past in the archives of our experiences. And like when cleaning the white board drove me to redecorate the rest, change sparks change. Our interconnected experiences inform us and push us to form new ones.

11 years later and I’ve found clarity in a white 2009 IKEA desk. But that’s change. It doesn’t just show up when you take on a job, start a new relationship, move to a new place, etc. It’s the day-to-day adjustments. Taking a different driving route, choosing a different kind of milk at the grocery store, waking up at 7am instead of 8am to get more of a morning routine in, redoing your white 2009 IKEA desk… 

We often use material possessions to retain permanence. The lingering childhood toys that we refuse to give away, old journal entries we wrote of happy times, the photographs of those we love but are no longer here… they, understandably, bring us comfort. They make us feel like we can hold on to our childhood, an achievement, a relationship, a version of ourselves… We can hold on without having to let go. What we fail to realize is that letting go doesn’t erase. It allows for more moments to come in. Change forces us to look back to move ahead. We can’t move forward without confronting and closing a past chapter.  Whether it be personal patterns and relationships or something more mundane, embracing change is the only way to truly honor the past and accept the future.  

It’s okay to want to hold on tight to things that remind of us of happier times or the people we miss. But whether we hold on to those things or let them go, they’ll stay alive with us as moments in time. 

Rediscovered After a Computer Crash

Recorded in Winter 2019 for the purpose of a class, this clip is a glimpse into my introspection of the then, numbing chaos I was living.

** TW: Death **

As I sat in a cold chair in a terminal of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, I spoke into the microphone app on my iPhone. Two strangers sitting across from me stared, probably wondering why I was using my phone as a spoken diary at 3 AM.

I had flown in from LAX and was on my way to a flight (my first ever solo flight) to Buenos Aires, Argentina. There, I was to join my mother and other family members, for the last week of my Aunt’s life. Claudia was my second mom. She was also the one who always told me what I didn’t want (but needed) to hear. A healer, a fighter… she was pure resilience. It’s hard to express the impact she had on my life into words, even more so in such a short blog post. But you can find my best attempt so far, in this blog post.

Hearing my reflection a little over a year later, this recording shows me just how much I’ve grown in the year of her loss. It marks the tangible shift in my perspective of change. It’s the reason I’ve become more independent; it’s the core of my new-found intentionality with my words and actions. It comforted me as I sat in that airport at 3 AM, when the only desire on my mind was to make it in time, praying she would wait for my arrival. It’s now reminded me of the need to step forward and move onward fearlessly.

And with that, a step into a project I’ve always hesitated to begin… my first ever podcast “As We Grow.” Here, I’ll share my words and seek out the stories of others. I’ll speak on the essence of this recording… the light and darkness of change, in relation to identity and self-growth. The beautiful and the complicated of life.

I’m a firm believer in the power of storytelling, in the comfort of words and connective experiences. My hope is that in sharing my story and those of others, I’m able to contribute to the much needed lack of human connection and empathy in today’s global climate.

Here’s to learning, as we grow.

Thank you, Insomnia.

From a young age, I’ve experienced the lovely, double-edged sword of late-night creativity bursts, powered by insomnia. The sleepless nights definitely have their drawbacks, but truthfully, I’ve always attributed the bulk of my personal growth to these untimely productivity bursts. As of late however, my occasional insomnia hasn’t had the same effect.

In less than two weeks, I’ll graduate from UC Santa Barbara. As I approach the end of an incredible chapter and step into a new one of uncertainty, heightened by the realities of the pandemic, I’ve struggled to feel hope. Waves of numbness, sadness, nostalgia, frustration, anger, and anxiety all occupy space within my mind at the same time. Sleepless night after sleepless night, I’m tormented by the devastating global circumstances that I watch on the news, knowing that it’s only a glance into what’s really going on. Granted, I do have the privilege of being safe and healthy at home with a supportive and loving family, for which I am so grateful. But even so, it’s heart-breaking to see the loss that is encompassing the world and the apathy present in many who do not seem to be concerned by the realities at hand.

At the same time, I’ve been reminded of the presence and power of true human connection. Recently, I was reading a book and came upon the quote circled below.

I took a moment to really process it. “Life is powerful but so are you.” For the first time in a long time, the darkness hovering me dissipated a bit. I started to realize… whether it’s the online videos of neighbors singing from balconies and cheering on essential workers, seeing a young person deliver an elderly stranger’s groceries to their car, the stories I hear from my family in Argentina, or my constant movie nights with family, I see so much light.

The videos we like and re-share, the comments we write, the words we speak, the actions we choose… they matter. Oftentimes, more so than we even realize. In providing resources, support, and/or love, our individual actions have the power to influence and better the lives of those around us. At the core of this impact lies: intention and empathy. It’s about sharing our experiences and perspectives, and listening to that of those around us, to collectively improve our societies.

It is for that reason and thanks to a long over-due, welcomed instance of insomnia that I present this new project.

I’ve always been a firm believer in honest content, so as bleak as this situation may be, I’m not going to sugar coat it. Instead, I’m going to highlight the light that exists even in these dark times, through the eyes of my lived experience and perspective. I’m going to share my stories and those of others around me, in the hopes that I can bring relief to others.

After all, sometimes all it takes is just a few words on a page.

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