Emily’s Workshop

How gloomy it is that I cannot photosynthesize under the sunlight. All I had done wrong was to be a student. School, then home, then a desk, then sleep, then the same four things again, arranged in the same order, like a machine convinced that repetition was a kind of safety. Outside, a virus had shrunk the whole world down to the size of a bedroom.

Inside that bedroom, my father kept saying we might move to America—had been saying it for two years, the way you hand someone a coat before they’ve said they’re cold. My mother wanted grades, discipline, a version of me who made sense on paper. So I studied for a country that didn’t exist yet, using a curriculum for a life I hadn’t started living, while also trying to keep pace with the one I was already failing to care about. Two systems, two sets of expectations, and somewhere underneath both of them, a question nobody had thought to ask me: what any of it was actually for.

What a philosophical question—and I definitely wasn’t equipped for it. I was not John Locke, and I was certainly not Socrates. I didn’t have the patience to sit still and meditate my way toward some hidden version of myself underneath all the noise. So I did the next easiest thing—I lay on my bed and let YouTube empty my head out, one video at a time, until there wasn’t enough of me left to ask anything. I got good at skipping the question, the way you skip a problem on a test. Except a test still ends. That question just kept showing up again the next morning, patiently waiting for an answer I still didn’t have.

I was fourteen when the algorithm, for once, did something worth thanking it for. It was late—the kind of late where the ceiling starts looking more interesting than it has any right to—and it offered me a song I hadn’t asked for, by a band I’d never heard of, in a language I didn’t speak. The band was SPYAIR. The song was My Friend. I clicked anyway. New content, new dopamine, the same reflex as every other night. Except this time the melody caught somewhere behind my ribs before I’d even understood a single word of it, and I found myself doing something I almost never did anymore: I wanted more of something. I typed the title into the search bar slowly, the way you type something you don’t want to get wrong. A handful of live performances came up. I clicked the one at the top without really deciding to.

Four men stood under wild sunlight—three with acoustic guitars, one with both hands on a cajon, keeping time like it was the only job left in the world. Korean subtitles crawled along the bottom of the screen. I don’t remember deciding to feel anything. I just remember that by the time the song ended, I was already reaching for my keyboard to play it again, and my hand came away wet. I hadn’t noticed I’d started crying. It was such a strange thing to discover about yourself secondhand—like finding out through the evidence that something in you was still capable of reacting to anything at all.

I went looking for who they were, and found out they’d been friends first. A classroom, then an after-school hour, then, eventually, a stage—as if the dream had grown out of friendship instead of the other way around, slowly enough that none of them had probably noticed the exact day one turned into the other. There was something in that order of events I couldn’t stop turning over. And there was the singer, IKE, who stood like someone who’d already decided the room would like him, and somehow the decision made it true. Confident in a way that looked less like certainty and more like a decision he made every single night. I’d been told my whole life that I had to choose—the thing you loved, the thing you were good at, the thing that paid the bills—that wanting all three was a kind of greed the world would eventually correct. Watching him, that rule just stopped making sense. Not because he’d found a loophole. Because he was standing there holding all three at once, and none of it looked like a compromise.

I watched every performance I could find for what felt like weeks. Which is probably why it hit the way it did, finding out IKE had already left SPYAIR—over a year before I’d even discovered they existed. I read the article twice, certain I’d misread a date. Then I kept reading and understood something worse: an illness that kept putting him in emergency rooms, a voice worn down by almost two decades of asking too much of it. He hadn’t stopped because he wanted to. He’d stopped because staying would have cost the people around him something he wasn’t willing to let them pay. I sat with that longer than I meant to—not sad about the music this time, sad about the arithmetic of it. That joy and pain had been occupying the exact same body the whole time, on the exact same stage, and I hadn’t known enough to tell the difference.

Then, almost a year later, he came back. Not with any kind of guarantee. Just a comeback. I remember reading IKE’s announcement and smiling so hard my mom looked over and asked, half-worried, if I was trying to imitate the Joker. I don’t know exactly what I expected to feel watching a stranger start over from nothing, but what I actually felt was something I hadn’t felt in longer than I could measure—not pressure, not obligation, just a plain, stubborn desire. I wanted things again. I wanted a dream that belonged to me instead of one assembled entirely out of other people’s expectations, the way my studying had been assembled out of my parents’.

I was fifteen when the country my father had been promising for two years finally stopped being an idea and became an actual street outside an actual window. I had spent so long preparing to arrive that I’d never once thought about what I’d feel like after. It turned out changing my surroundings didn’t automatically change me. I brought myself along—the old habits, the same unanswered questions, the fourteen-year-old who still didn’t fully know what she was studying for. But I also brought the other thing along with her. The stubborn part that had learned, somewhere in the two years before, how to keep going even without a reason handed to her in advance.

I was sixteen when I learned that wanting something badly did not mean I would automatically know how to reach it. Sophomore year was difficult for me, especially when I looked at my grades and realized how far they had fallen. For a while, it was hard not to see those grades as more than numbers. They felt like proof that I was not doing well, and sometimes it was difficult to separate doing badly from being a failure. I had spent so much time wondering what I was supposed to become that I had started measuring myself by how well I seemed to be becoming it.

That year made something clear to me that I had not understood before. Failing at something and being a failure were not the same thing. I could regret what happened without turning it into a definition of myself. I could be disappointed without deciding that disappointment was the end of the story. I had admired IKE for coming back after losing something he had built for years, but at sixteen, I began to understand a quieter version of that lesson. Starting again does not always look dramatic. Sometimes it is simply deciding that one bad part of your story does not get to write the rest of it.

There’s another SPYAIR song I keep returning to now: My World. In it, the singer leans against a wall through the night, thinking about himself and wondering whether the destination he has chosen is really the right one. He does not find an easy answer. Instead, he keeps walking. He asks what he must not lose in order to remain himself, and whether, somewhere along the way, he will learn to love his own world. The song never promises that confusion will disappear. It only suggests that the things we are looking for may be found by continuing forward, and that the light is somewhere ahead.

I think that was the part I needed to hear.

I used to think that finding the right path meant knowing where it would lead. I thought motivation had to come before movement, that I needed a reason before I could make myself care, that I had to know exactly what I wanted before I was allowed to want anything at all. Now I think I had it backward. Sometimes you walk first. Sometimes you hurt, stop, hesitate, choose wrong, and keep going anyway. The answer does not arrive neatly in front of you just because you have asked for it. Some things can only be understood after you have lived far enough to see them differently.

I am seventeen now, and I have just started my junior year. I know I need to do better than I did last year, but I do not know exactly how this year will turn out. I do not know whether I will reach the goals I have in my head, whether the path I am on is the right one, or whether I will look back someday and realize that I needed to change directions. Eleventh grade has barely begun, so I cannot pretend that I have already figured any of that out.

But maybe I do not need to.

For a long time, not knowing the answer felt like a reason to stop. Now I am trying to see it differently. If My World is about learning to love your own world by continuing to walk through it, then maybe this year is part of that walking. I do not know where eleventh grade will take me. I do not know what I will become by the time it ends. I only know that I am here now, at the beginning of another year, and I can take the next step without knowing where every step after that will lead.

No one can grow for me. Not a song, not SPYAIR, not IKE, not even the version of him I once imagined so carefully that he became more of a symbol than a person. He could show me what it looked like to want something badly enough to return to it. His voice could reach me on days when nothing else could. But he could not choose my destination for me, and he could not tell me what I was allowed to keep in order to remain myself. The light arrives whether or not I’m ready for it—indifferent, on schedule, asking nothing of me. What happens to it after that has never been the sun’s job.

I still can’t photosynthesize under the sunlight. I still can’t stand beneath it and expect to grow just because the conditions are finally right. But I’ve stopped waiting to be handed better light, a clearer reason, or someone else’s motivation to borrow. Fourteen, fifteen, seventeen—I carry all of them, unmotivated and uncertain and stubborn in turns, and I keep walking anyway. Maybe I will not always know whether I have chosen the right destination. Maybe I will have to stop and change directions more than once. But perhaps that is what it means to grow into my own world. Some days are barely at all. Most days without noticing.

But I do.