Endpaper
Leaving the Church, Keeping Its Ties
I have no idea why I chose to go back to Utah. When my parents called me a few weeks earlier and asked if I wanted a ticket, I said yes on autopilot. Later, I felt dishonest. I was embarrassed to be flying home for a religion I was supposed to have completely disavowed.
Skating Beyond Legacy Lines
You can only circle an area so many times before the joy dulls into monotony.
A Senior’s River Run
Ever since I got to Harvard, I’ve wanted to make my time as “normal” as possible to correct for the abnormality in my path to this institution.
Astrophysics 2
Students line up to peer through the telescope at the Loomis-Michael Observatory atop the Science Center.
Beneath the Stars and Planets
Curiosity and skepticism for what really dwells in space are what initially captured my interest in astrophysics, and I decided then, at nine years old, that I could imagine a life studying astronomy.
Kaitlyn Language Endpaper
Two cartoon-ish figures — a mother and a daughter — in space, with the latter spiraling out of orbit from the former. Set against a background of stars which take the shape of Chinese characters or English letters.
On Display
By letting someone into my space, albeit virtually, I can share with them how I see the world.
Bachelor Sports Fan
The author will be the first to criticize the Bachelor franchise, which she's been watching for seven years. But how different is being a Bachelor fan from being an avid sports fan, really?
Kaitlyn Endpaper 4
A waterfall on Saratoga Creek, which runs through the author's hometown — her favorite place to slow down and decompress.
Kaitlyn Endpaper 2
Sunlight illuminates the trees on the author's favorite hiking trail in Villa Montalvo.
Growth and Decay
In a time when I felt I had nothing, not even a sense of who I was, I remembered that the earth gives me — gives us — so many gifts that I don’t have to work to earn or prove myself worthy of.
On Finstas and Fractured Selves
My New Year’s resolution was to try my best to stop taking everything so damn seriously: do more, think less, lower the stakes. I wanted to do whatever possible to get out of my own head — to reconnect with the humor and voice I felt like I had lost, to move through and inside of my life instead of adjacent to it.
Bad Plant Mom
Plenty of people kill their plants, but I shouldn’t be one of them. Plants motivate much of my art and writing; I’m taking a plant biology course and researching forests for my thesis. There’s an embarrassing dissonance between how much I care about plants and how little I manage to take care of them.