today, i am 21

tomorrow, i'll be a day older than 21. the day after that, two days.

The following is a letter addressed to every version of me on every day past 21. The letter is written as if as soon as I finished writing it, I'd forgotten everything I knew about myself.

Hey!

You are Tian. Your name is Daniel, so your friends may call you variations of Daniel and Tian, including dtian, dt, tink, dan, denial, etc. You’ve grown up ok with anything, but more recently, you’ve begun to prefer Tian, as you’ve outgrown your religious etymology in Daniel (meaning God is my judge). You were supposed to be named Jiminy, after Jiminy Cricket, before your sister thankfully intervened. In the past 8 weeks, you’ve been traveling through Asia, carrying a Jiminy Cricket pin, which you saw as reminiscent of Pinocchio’s journey to becoming moral and righteous. As Jiminy had been appointed to be Pinocchio’s official conscience and moral compass, you felt the original naming to be apt. By the end of the trip, you had regrettably lost the pin. But you feel convicted. By the end, you feel you’ve become Jiminy. You’ve become your judge.

You feel this way because you’ve decided to live by two main philosophies, connected by one central dogma. The first is that you understand that moral truth exists as a projection of your values. You express this belief by questioning as much as you can. You disagree violently with anything that’s done for the sole, unevaluated excuse of following precedent. The second is a framework you refer to as amoeba theory. By amoeba theory, you understand yourself to be a high velocity, directionless single-celled organism. I’ll explain high velocity later. You are directionless because at every moment, the amoeba, you, will encounter other cells, or opportunities. If you decide to eat a cell, you will point to wherever that opportunity leads—each opportunity is directed. Imagine how a cue ball moves on a pool table. In amoeba theory, you only have agency within your own cell. Regardless of how opportunities pan out, remember that your performance is defined only by the framework in which you make decisions. This is because in the open sea of reality, you may be conventionally successful or an absolute bum, but you know well how variance often leaves reality out of your control. Your progress is defined solely by the way you perfect your decision-making; reality will follow.

The dogma that unites these thoughts is your belief of existence as an ebbing and flowing of energy (maybe qi), which accumulates in the non-living and is only reshaped and catalyzed by the living. You believe humanness comes from consciousness, the ability to discern and judge this existential energy, and the capacity to adjust the way you reshape it. Thus, moral absolution cannot exist without the context of your own experiences, values, and perspective—since any judgments on existence are formed by social conceptions.

Remember that by amoeba theory, you understand yourself to inherently possess high velocity. This is because as existential energy passes through your senses, it accumulates. You’ll feel a pressure building up in your stomach that seems to only alleviate as you talk and connect with people or while you scroll reels and fantasize about your next hobby or ideal life. You must understand this to be a creative energy, and understand your soul to be a vessel with limited capacity. If you aren’t able to redirect the pressure, stronger and stronger feelings and thoughts start to come up. In this way, you can trust that it’s in your nature to build up this pressure. When you need to exhale around friends, you will connect dearly and love vitally. But alone, it’s a bit of a different story. With that, I’m gonna need your help.

In the past 21 years, I haven’t been as good as I’d like about redirecting that pressure. I’ve picked up coping mechanisms, planning and thinking all about what I’m going to do right up until I actually need to start doing something; just to drop it and plan something else instead. I definitely have an aversion to the learning curve of picking up most skills, which blocks me from ever truly pursuing them. But now, you’ll know how to change that.

First, boredom is a resource. Once you live alone, you will be bored and lonely, more than ever before. Harness it. If you don’t want to do something, sit in the boredom. Literally stare at a wall until you’re so bored you may as well do the laundry. I know that once you’re bored enough, you can quite literally do anything.

Second, you understand now what this pressure means. To you, creation and connection are two sides of the same coin: it’s a lifeline. You gotta let the energy go somewhere. So create! So draw. So sing, so dance. So compose, sculpt, write. So create, as if gravity itself demands your tears. Create, as if the shape of your soul imbues longing, in every breath you take, to exhale script or play or prose. Just create. It’s what you were made for.

The final tenet in your dogma is one logical conclusion from all of this hickory dickory bullshit. You may feel motivated by a desire to become. You’d love to be famous, rich, and feel validated by how people who knew you long ago talk about you. You imagine these peaks in the distance and how you’ll feel standing on them. But if existence is only energy, shaped like stop-motion clay, existence is ephemeral. There is no possibility of you existing other than you, one moment from now. So the only thing anyone, anywhere can change in their lives is themselves, one moment from now. You’d make decisions obsessing over peaks you don’t even know exist, when you are, in the present moment, your best (and only) possible self, positioned in the best (and only) possible way to take one more step forward. So imagine less. Decide how you decide to take steps. And trust the velocity in your gut. Whichever step you decide to take next will be heavy.

All that’s left is to take good steps.