taking your medicine
I cannot stand the sound of Velcro.
It does to me what I can only imagine “nails on a chalkboard” does to other people. There’s a discomfort that sits behind my ears, near the base of my skull, and I find myself completely unable to focus on anything except that awful, awful tearing noise. Even writing this sentence, imagining the sound of peeling Velcro makes it hard to focus on what word comes next.
The number of Velcro shoes I had as a child was very few, and honestly, each one was one too many. I avoid it at all costs in anything I buy. Give me a button, a zipper, a clasp — but dear God, no Velcro.
There are plenty of things as a child I used to absolutely abhor. Sure, there was the classic thing of being a picky eater, which I’ve slowly gotten over. But there were also several other far more … interesting ones. I had a compulsion to keep things on my body symmetric — I’d sit in one position, and a few minutes later, switch to a perfectly mirrored pose. I mentally kept track of my steps on tiled surfaces to make sure that each foot touched a similar number of colored tiles and cracks. I was somewhat of a germaphobe — I distinctly remember washing my basketball in the sink after playing with it outside because it had gotten dirty, not to mention the handwashing followed by opening doors with my forearms.
Remnants of those behaviors still keep on in my soul. I will notice if something’s asymmetric for too long. If you pay attention, you will notice subtle changes in my gait across tiled floors. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see the ways in which I’ve learned to grow comfortable with things that used to give me discomfort. Not all, though.
In my senior year of college, I had a chat with someone on the tables outside of New City Microcreamery. We talked a bit about my economics journey, the paths she was considering, what advice I might have having just gone through the PhD application process, and the ways that we chose to do things at MIT. At some point in talking about “how do you feel about graduate school”, we circled around to nervousness, and what made us feel that.
There’s a lot of really “classic” things I don’t get nervous about. Public speaking has been fine to me for a very long while. I’ve been told that I generally seem very comfortable when I’m talking to many people, though largely, I feel like it’s come through just doing it gazillions of times, a brief dip into consulting, some acting things, and just going up into the front of a room and entering a fugue state for an hour. In similar veins, I’ve felt pretty comfortable in improv, in messing up, and others. Perhaps the biggest example I had back then was when I jumped out of my comfort zone into the deep end by doing a 5-day hackathon in a literal glass box, which sure, was new and different, but not exactly “nerve-racking”.
In the immediate aftermath of that conversation, I got to thinking about what actually did make me nervous, what makes me uncomfortable. That list goes on for a long while. But it’s interesting how nothing came to mind in that moment.
After I stopped doing piano lessons, I “played” songs by looking up the chords online and playing something that remotely sounded like the song. (I learned later this is basically how lead sheets and fake books work, and I was turning myself into a jazz musician.) But I restricted myself almost exclusively to major and minor chords, rarely hitting 7th chords (of any kind), let alone a suspended chord or something with upper extensions.
Many chords, in isolation, are jarring. Take, for example, Fdim, Bbaug, or E7#9/B. Out of context, I personally think these chords are super gnarly. They’re grating, designed with dissonance in mind. Two of them have tritones, “the devil’s interval”, within them. And yet, if you play these chords in the right context, it all sounds perfect. (Specifically, you can hear them in You’ve Got A Friend In Me (under “ever” here), Vienna (opening chord here), and New York State of Mind (under “taking” here). Whatever tension these chords have, it pulls you to a new place, a place that just feels natural to move to because of where you were before.
Someone trying to force a metaphor may say it represents the fact that we need to be uncomfortable to appreciate the things that are comforting. But that feels overwrought to me — it’s just that I’m growing to appreciate the dissonance in this one particular setting.
Why do we do things that we don’t like?
- Sometimes, it’s because we have to. I mean, just take the phrase “grunt work”. We we might not like it, but we need to meet some deadline, or pass some class, or make something happen. More broadly, this can be because of some sense of obligation to someone else, an organization, society at large. Of course, that obligation can be real or fake — take, for example, the fear that you’ll be judged so harshly if every detail on your presentation isn’t picture perfect, or if you told a friend that you’d go to their performance even if you don’t enjoy ballet.
- Sometimes, it’s because there’s something on the other side of it that we want. That last example could fit in this bucket if you want to be good friends with someone, and this is a way to show that you value that friendship. Maybe it’s that you work out even though you know you’ll be uncomfortable being sore the next day. Or taking medicine to feel better even if it might taste bad.1 Or sitting at a piano doing drills because you want to be better at it. Or, for some grad students — grinding away on research in hopes of landing a job you really like.
- Sometimes, it’s because we haven’t thought about the fact that we don’t like it enough, and never bothered to change, or we’re too stubborn to replace it. Like a shirt that you hang onto while being in denial of the fact that it’s becoming increasingly threadbare. Or the stereotypical “mid-life crisis” , where you look up one day and realize you’re not happy being a cog in a machine.
There are things in life I avoid.
For example, I still haven’t restarted my trivia-learning in earnest, or my Scrabble-learning, or trying my hand at writing a crossword in earnest.2 I know these goals would be lovely in theory — but am I not willing to put in the work? Am I scared I’ll fail? Or is what I tell myself true, and it really is just a lack of time (or, more accurately, an unwillingness to prioritize it above other things)?
I’ve realized throughout grad school that my work feels best if I stop working the moment I don’t want to do something anymore.
Partly, this is just how I’ve gone through life — it’s the ethos that took me through high school, then through undergrad, and finally getting into grad school. I just kept choosing things I enjoyed, and slowly, those haphazard steps started moving in a direction.3 Some say that you need to love research in order to choose grad school, but that certainly wasn’t true for me. To be clear, I didn’t (and don’t) hate research, but I also didn’t know if I would want it to be my career, the thing I do for work every single day.
There have been times in grad school where I’ve been really excited about work. Thinking about running education programs brings me back to my ESP days. Thinking about the big questions of “how should admissions systems work” leads to such cool discussions. I wrote a Stata package to implement MDRD. I worked on extensive documentation for a project. I read up on CS papers to understand how to efficiently implement an estimator. I made a LaTeX template. I went out of my way to talk to people who are doing work that I find interesting.
There are also times where I don’t feel like working. Every time I’ve had to push through that has felt … not great. To be clear, I know that work can’t always be sunshine and roses, and sometimes, you need to “take your medicine”. There’s times a paper has to get done, and it feels like grunt work to edit and rewrite, to dot your i’s, and make something into a final version. There’s times that you need to do infinite robustness checks, even though you might feel you have enough evidence. I’ve been told that it is far easier to start new projects than to complete them, and I’m starting to see the truth in that statement.
But I do try to avoid that feeling as much as I can. Sometimes, I’ll have a day that’s just not shaping out to be one where I’m excited. And usually, I’ll stop, and just come back the next day. And sometime that feeling takes longer to go away, and other times shorter; I’m lucky to be in a position where I’m able to follow that instinct. It also means that I feel a tad bit obligated to follow the motivation when it hits me hard — it’s much rarer, of course, but sometimes I can’t stop thinking about how I’d want to look at something, or I want to read a book to understand more of the cultural context behind something I’m studying.
Every year, I get together with about 75 other people, many of them friends from my undergrad dorm, and do the MIT Mystery Hunt. If you’ve never heard of it (or puzzle hunts before), each of the following could reasonably be a puzzle you encounter:
- You’re trying to solve a crossword puzzle. But they neglected to attach a diagram. Also, each clue has an extra letter. So does each entry. But somehow, you need put it together.
- A jigsaw puzzle, but the picture is blank, and it can be made 6 different ways, and each way it gets made has a hidden message.
- A set of assorted pictures that seemingly have nothing to do with each other. What you didn’t know at first was that each image obliquely clues a song by Neil Ciciriega.
None of these will have any instructions. And from each puzzle, you’re supposed to find a single word or short phrase for an answer. Take anywhere from 5 to 20 of those answers together, and use them to solve a “metapuzzle”. And put maybe 10 metapuzzle answers together to solve a metameta.
MIT Mystery Hunt is the largest, hardest, and wildest hunt in existence. It runs from Friday to Monday over MLK Jr. weekend. Thousands of competitors, some on teams with more than 150 members. Anywhere from (usually) 150–200 puzzles.
It’s absurd.
The simple goal, of course, is to finish. (Our team’s managed to do it twice to date.) However, finishing first comes with an extra “prize”: writing the next year’s hunt. The phrase most often used when you learn that someone’s one is “congratudolences”. Writing hunt is a whole year of work for hundreds of people. I’ve heard some stories of some people (usually a software engineer who’s ready for a sabbatical) who quit their jobs just because they’re running hunt.
The big question to ask of course, is why? Why would I subject myself to this? It’s basically 3 straight days of keeping my brain fully on, toiling away at puzzles, helping guide our team’s strategy, getting way less sleep than I normally do, and on occasion, dealing with other’s slightly shot emotional states when we both are sleep deprived, tired, cranky, and feeling hopelessly stuck.
I’ve been asking myself this question since 2019, the first year that I hunted with NES. We started out as an incredibly uncompetitive team,4 and I started out as someone who popped in and thought about a few puzzles. Over the years, not only have we gotten better, but my relationship with hunting has become one in which I set aside my entire weekend and become entirely unreachable, and might pull an all-nighter for fun. Nowadays, we’re one of the bigger teams. The last two years, we’ve placed in fourth. Fourth.
I’ve heard people talk about the fact that we might win in the next several years. And I think we’ll want to, once we feel sufficiently ready. And it’s weird to be in that position when just seven years ago we were excited about solving 30 puzzles and one meta.
But why? Why do I do this? Why in the world would I possibly be excited for the potential of running a hunt? I could just go off to a beach for a long weekend, play games with friends, read a book, be a couch potato. Why do I do hard things — and in particular, this hard thing?
-
It’s nice to be able to work on something hard, but knowing that there is an answer if you just have the right “a-ha”. It stands in stark contrast to research, something also very difficult but with an incredibly amorphous end goal. Of course, Hunt also comes with spending dozens of hours staring at a computer screen feeling like you’re getting nowhere.
As I write this, I’m wondering how much of a parallel this has to high school math competitions for me, in the sense that they’re also very constrained/contrived things, but with right answers at the end of the day. But I think that some of the other reasons ring more true for that, such as…
-
The social interaction of getting to do something together. A decent chunk of people I know from Next House come back to Boston just for hunt, and it’s always lovely talking about how we’ve been and being able to exist around each other again.. Of course, there’s usually not that much time for catching up because we’re stuck doing puzzles the entire time. But it’s still good to see them. Or, for those that don’t fly in, to chat over Discord.
While also somewhat true, this also isn’t everything. I have lots of friends on NES, but for the most part, they weren’t my close friends in undergrad. Those people are usually on other teams, if they hunt at all — of course, I try to make some time to see them during the weekend, but the weekend is not primarily spent hanging out with people. If I wanted that, I’d just be taking trips to NYC or SF to see all the friends that live there.
-
Feeling smart? A sense of pride and achievement? The wording isn’t quite right here, but I think it boils down to the fact that having that “a-ha” moment can be so satisfying.
Of course, this also isn’t quite it, because these days, I spend a lot of the weekend not actually solving puzzles. I’m checking in on logistics, seeing if there’s any puzzles that haven’t been touched, helping coordinate documentation collaboration with our remote crew, and saying words at our “State of the Solve” recaps every few hours. If I wanted the “feeling smart” bit, I wouldn’t do any of that, and I’d just spend the whole time solving puzzles.
Part of the impetus for finishing up this blog (which has been in the works for several months) is that hunt happened this last weekend, and I set aside 72 hours to just do puzzles, and the fact is that I was excited for it.
At the end of the day, there is just something fun about it that I can’t pin down. And maybe that’s all that I can say about it.
A few things that I take active discomfort in that is very hard to stop feeling:
- Specific types of self-reflection. This largely comes about when I’m forced to listen to myself — like many people, hearing a recording of my own voice just sounds wrong. I’ve gotten over this somewhat because of a cappella and voice training, for which improvement largely relies on listening to yourself repeatedly. And these days, I think I’m fairly fine with doing this, but it still feels wrong whenever I hear it.
- Being seen negatively by others — I mean, who doesn’t? But in particular, I think i really dislike being seen as someone who doesn’t care about others, someone who isn’t competent at the things I want to be competent in (largely socioemotional things; I’m very fine with asking questions when I don’t understand something), and someone who is not friendly.
- Some things related to gender and transitioning — this isn’t the right place to talk about these things, but what’s true for many people is also true for me, in broad strokes.
The choice to do something reveals something about who you are. It reflects the values you hold, and impacts the ways those values evolve over time.
It’s interesting to view my life through this lens because so many of my decisions are not made with the long-term picture in mind. This isn’t to say that they’re careless, of course; I’d like to think that my many blogs thinking through big decisions disavows that notion entirely. But because I end up making so many decisions based on what I enjoy in the moment, taking the natural next step, I often find myself recognizing patterns in retrospect that I didn’t observe when the choice was made.
Of course, “doing difficult things” is epitomized very, very deeply by the often-masochistic culture of MIT. People feel a need to always be busy (even if it’s not competitive), want to prove to themselves they can take a courseload with umpteen units, taking the hard version of a course even if it has no actual tangible benefit, and so on.
I certainly wasn’t immune to this all. I took hard classes I didn’t need to. I kept myself so busy5 All The Time. And of course, I chose MIT in the first place, an institution known for the fact that every class, at baseline, is hard.
I think sometimes about alternate worlds where this didn’t happen. Where, for example, I went to Anonymous University X for undergrad instead of MIT. Impossible to know the counterfactuals, of course, but I suspect what would have happened was that I would have wanted to keep pushing myself, do a double major, be a part of a bajillion clubs, and more. I’d have found my own way to make it hard for me.
And at the end of the day, I don’t think I know why that is.
One of the things I’ve always thought was a bit odd about this all is that I don’t think I’m ambitious. There’s a lot of related words that I think are true. Enthusiastic. Energetic. “An endless battery”. A desire to do things (good things, and to care about those things).
But not ambitious. To me, ambition has some connotations that aren’t as true, like a willingness to do things even when you’re not intrinsically motivated, just because you want to pursue some larger goal (usually associated with achieving something). Ambition feels like it necessitates some level of self-sacrifice. And at the end of the day, that’s just not me. That’s not medicine I’m willing to take.
I don’t quite know how to pin down what drives me instead. There’s some amount of it that’s just trying to bring some joy to the people around me. Having moments that make me smile. Caring about other people, making their lives better. Teaching, and helping get people excited about learning. Community.
These drives are amorphous, they move around a lot, and all are situation-dependent. And I think it’s why I’ve just found myself letting my instincts decide what I want to do, and seeing the patterns that emerge afterwards. And all things considered, it’s led me to a spot where I think I do feel happy.
I hope that still remains the case next year, once all the dust has settled and I know what I’m doing after grad school. Who knows what that’ll turn out to be.
I’ve realized recently that I would, in fact, be sad to move out of Boston in a year and a half. I’ve lived in this city for nearly a third of my life. I navigate the streets with ease, have friends all over town, and I really do feel like I’m home here. Maybe I’ll try to stay.
There are, of course, some downsides, like being in a bubble, not exploring more, and the winters. Winter can be great — I love waking up and seeing a winter wonderland outside. But those days happen less and less, and instead, I’m just left with chapped lips, frozen ears, and a heart that yearns for warmth and sun.
And, of course, the most important downside — it seems every single winter coat uses Velcro to tighten fabric around your wrists.
-
to be honest, i only ever had medicine that tasted bad once. for the most part, i got to drink children’s motrin and whatnot, which always tasted like getting to stay home for a day. but one time on a trip i got sick, and had to take adult medicine, and without thinking bit into a naproxen pill. i do not recommend. ↩
-
since writing this statement in ~september 2025, i now actually have written one! and a bunch of other puzzles too! ↩
-
This is the ethos of one of my favorite MIT Admissions blog posts, petey’s applying sideways, as well as a theme present in my posts of continuing and leaning in). ↩
-
as evidence of the fact that we weren’t very good: our team name comes from a wrong answer i and two friends submitted way back in 2019. we’d gotten to the end of the puzzle, and knew the answer phrase was 3 words long, started with “national”, ended with “service”, and had a middle word meaning “to wear away”. we submitted National Erosion Service, which, wildly enough, was incorrect. ↩
-
during the worst-offending semester, I was leading 2 clubs, TAing, taking 5 classes, and I’m pretty sure doing a UROP + looking for internships? yikes. do not recommend ↩
Comments