REBRIEF: are my desires even mine?

+ the struggle of writing routines

Welcome to debrief! This newsletter is on pause and will be sent out semimonthly while I finish writing my book. Please enjoy this writing and life update, as well as an essay from the archives. Thank you so much for reading—I can’t wait to be back in full force!

How’s your summer/winter going?? Here’s a polaroid of N and I at my law partner Max’s birthday bash!

Book update: I am this close to being done with my second draft. One of the hardest things about writing a book for the first time is exactly that—it’s your first time. Going into it, I had no idea what my writing process would be like.

Will I be one of those writers who can beast out a near-primetime-ready first draft? (No.) Will I be one of those writers who can go on benders and then churn out hundreds of pages in a trance state? (Definitely not.) Will I be one of those writers who writes 2000 words every day? (LOL.)

It is only through the trial of writing that I can discern what my process for writing is—an infuriating concept to someone like me, who’s been able to map out most processes (studying for an exam, producing a legal memo, etc.) before even starting. But in this way, writing has been a bizarrely therapeutic exercise for me in letting go of control—writing will take however long it takes, even if I try to hurry it along or push through at times. (I’ve also become obsessed with the writing routines of famous writers.)

Today’s REBRIEF is about how for so long, I only knew what I wanted in relation to what others wanted or didn’t want. Looking back on it, I gain new appreciation for this opportunity in my life to think deeply about what I want, with minimal interference from the outside world. It’s led to a couple of surprising lifestyle changes, which I’ll talk about another time.

I miss you guys so much! I hope you are all enjoying the summer (or winter, if you’re in the southern hemisphere). Talk again in a few weeks xx

Often times, I wish I could abdicate responsibility for my own life. I am excellent at following instructions—I am less comfortable with deciding things for myself, probably because for so many years, I never decided anything for myself. I was told when and where to go for school, shuttered between mandatory classes, and picked extracurriculars from the pre-selected activities that my parents felt were “suitable.”

And even when I did feel like I was deciding something for myself—those Limited Too jeans in sixth grade, trying out for high school dance team, dating a supposed "bad boy"—those weren't, in fact, my choices at all. It's not like I dreamt of those desires in a vacuum and woke up one day wanting those things. Instead, I filtered the dreams, hopes, desires of those around me into myself through various mediums: TV, magazines, overheard conversations. Without the stated preferences of other people, I had absolutely no preferences of my own.​

This is a tough realization. Even now, I'm trying to unpack the implications. Did I even want to attend Yale in the first place, or did I want to go because so many others (including Rory Gilmore and Blair Waldorf) wanted that? Did I ever want to be a lawyer, or did I just want money and to be respected and spoken highly of, the way that I saw people speak of lawyers (when they weren't making lawyer jokes)? What parts of my life are truly my own, and what parts are mere figments of other people's desires?

Unfortunately, my online presence is also a hodgepodge of other people's desires, for the most part. I'm no aesthetic genius, and I certainly do not have an innate eye for filming and editing. To figure out what I should post, I watched popular videos and tried to synthesize the common elements—showing food, talking about money and spending and consumption, cute animals. I focused on making videos with those elements, sometimes all at once in the form of vlogs. I even had an internal checklist of which events should go into a vlog to maximize its chances of "success" (AKA views). (In case you're curious, it included: a nice view; working out; brief description of work (emphasis on brief); a perk at work; and after-work event such as drinks, dinner, or a concert. It was the Bend and Snap of TikTok vlogs. I still find these elements present in many popular vlogs, particularly the law/tech/banking/consulting girlies. I had a separate checklist for the "chaotic vlog," which focuses more on overwhelming the viewer.)

The problem with any type of hacking—growth hacking, life hacking, study hacking—is that at the end of the day, you are working within the existing system. Hacking assumes the existence of rules and order, or else it would have nothing to disrupt. You can't hack nothing. And while I love a good cheat code (looking at you, rosebud; ;) as much as the next person, I've come to understand that a life preoccupied with hacking will never reflect interests and desires outside of the existing structures. I didn't want to feed into the content mill's obsession with consumption and glamorizing capitalistic endeavors, but by trying to hack TikTok views, I ended up doing just that.

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with another content creator who made a lot of videos about her job, and we both had the same question on our minds: What do we want to put out into the world? In a lot of ways, this is the same tension that we had to negotiate at our jobs—being enough "of the machine" to fit in while not erasing ourselves because we, as women, were never meant to be part of the machine in these traditional corporate environments in the first place. It's a challenging balance to navigate and one to which I was curiously attuned when speaking with female law firm partners. It took me a good five years in biglaw to figure it out for biglaw, and now that I'm in the great unknown, the question arises anew: how much of me is acceptable, and how much of them do I need to emulate in order to survive?

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