I can’t recognize myself in the mirror. I’m not exaggerating in the slightest, I genuinely can’t. When I picture myself and what I look like, nothing definite comes to mind. I see a vague outline, certain features, or even the double chin that comes about when I look down, but I can’t put it all together anymore. 

I can tell you who I am—my name is Alton Wang, I was born in the 626, I speak four languages, I love eating and cooking, I spend a ridiculous amount of time taming my hair every morning, and I blast Chinese music when I’m alone. That is what I’ve said to every potential roommate during my roommate search. 

Nothing physical. I would never mention that I have brown eyes or that my hair is, in fact, black, or that I’ve been struggling with my weight since I was in elementary school, or even that if you look carefully, you can see the remnants of a surgery I had on my eyelids as a child. 

Who I feel like I am as a person is so disparate and so disjointed from what I see in the mirror that I tend to avoid studying my face in the mirror. We’ve all done that. Stare at your face—or actually, anyone’s face, for that matter—and you’ll notice features you’ve never seen before. I know the faces of people I’ve just met far better than the people I’ve known all my life—once I know the person, physical features are replaced by emotional and characteristic features. 

I’ve felt lost for quite some time now. I feel like I’ve lost touch with who I think I am or who I want to be, and who I really am. 

But I know the reason why.

For a number of years, I’ve been burying my head in the past. I’ve been clinging on to vestiges of the past, old relationships, old friendships, things that have been fading for quite some time—but I’ve just been unable to let go. For the past two years, I’ve consciously known that I do this. Yet I cling on, throwing more and more hope, time, patience, and attention to something that, simply said, has already died. 

I’m really scared right now that I made the wrong choice months ago. I told myself that there was no way that I would become an art director in advertising, and that the field just really isn’t for me. Right now, looking back, I realize how different my dream exactly one year ago is from mine now. I’m not even sure if I have a dream anymore.

I miss working on ad stuff. I miss getting into a campaign, throwing yourself and immersing your soul into the world of materialistic thought and aesthetic appeal. But it’s also so much more than that. It’s a platform for me to learn and grow as a person, every piece of research I’ve done for any ad project has only added and helped me learn more and expand my views on the world. 

That was all I wanted out of a future career—to keep expanding, to keep learning. I don’t think I can get more disparate from ad then to be going to a small liberal arts university on the east coast versus Art Center. 

Right now, I’m going through all my old ad stuff, or at least all the stuff that I still have. I feel like that was when I really was myself… when I was the most at ease and the most comfortable with whatever I would have been doing. I haven’t felt that way in a while. I still remember the conversation I had with my awesome ad/graphic design teacher Z about me stepping aside from pursuing advertising; that was the moment I switched gears. 

I just really hope I made the right choice. There really is no turning back now.

I’d finally be able to go visit you. I’d tell you how much I’ve missed you, how much I’ve needed you in these past few years, and how much you’ve missed out on. I’d tell you about how hard I’ve tried, with you in the back of my mind the entire time, to make you and proud. I’d tell you that you get the most credit in shaping me into the way I am today, and that everything good about me I get from you. I’d tell you that there is no other person I want back in my life, even though I know you’re with me 24/7. I’d tell you that I’m ready to set out on my own because of you. I’d tell you how sorry I am for never being able to take care of you and unable to do something while you slowly grew weaker. I’d tell you how lost I feel and how misdirected I feel, how conflicted I am in faith, life, and love. You carved a huge chunk out of my heart, and I still feel a little empty every day of my life. You left too early.

I only hope you’re up there, somewhere, watching over me. I just have this feeling that you are.

I have this odd habit where I just stop everything I’m doing at the moment, close my eyes, and think. I take in that moment, put things into context, remind myself why I’m doing what I’m doing, and take note of my past that led me to that point, and the future that I might be headed towards. This is how I don’t lose faith, this is how I don’t waver, and this is how I’ve made it to where I am.

You should try it sometime.

Stop panicking, stop worrying, and stop the confusion for just one moment—and piece it all together for yourself.

I have a goal in mind. I might not be sure of what it really is yet, but I know there must be something out there for me, and I’m determined to find it. 

To me, time is a segment. It’s not a circle, it’s not a point, and it’s not an infinite line—time begins the moment you are born, thus when your consciousness exists, and ends the moment you die. Perhaps history is simply a figment of the imagination. But that’s not what I want to say.

There is no past, present, and future; there is only the known, the currently experiencing, and the unknown. It’s naught to do with destiny, free will, determination, or any of that jazz—my point is simple. There really is no cause and effect, your past doesn’t determine your future, nor does your future determine your past. It’s both. Your future (i.e., your goals, dreams, aspirations) determine what you do and how you do it—creating your past. Your past (i.e., what you’ve done, what you’ve failed to do, and what you tried to do) determine whether or not you achieve the future you want. 

So you move in one direction on the segment, and sometimes you move in the other direction. You waver between Point A, birth, and Point B, death. It’s not a long segment, no—before you know it, you reach Point B, and time ceases to exist because you cease to exist. 

What in the heck does that have to do with our futures? Our present is our future. Today is tomorrow, and tomorrow is today. Frankly, yesterday, today, and tomorrow should, I believe, be synonymous. “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today,” some say, and don’t spend today wishing that something had been done tomorrow. There’s no point. You’re simply wishing to move in different directions on the segment of time we call “life,” and you might be able to control, temporarily, where you’re headed, but in the end, we all arrive at Point B. 

Here’s news for ya—we die. 

Cue the applause, or shall I say, the gasps of horror.

Time ends. Think about that. Take one of those “moments” I mentioned at the beginning and really wrap your head around that. No, put heaven and hell, put the afterlife, and put enlightenment away in a box, lock it, and onto a shelf. Think about death. Isn’t that our ultimate destiny? Isn’t that the end of time? Isn’t that, in fact, the reason why these figments of time (the past, present, and future) are so important to us?

Hope? Hope is what fuels us. Hope is what pushes us to move forward.

Hope is what allows us to bear through the most difficult times, in those hopeless situations, we still hold out that sliver of hope to get us through.

We cling to hope, we hold on even when it seems like all hope is lost, we believe that things can get better. Hope really is a central facet to humanity—just as much as emotions and our consciousness are. And it is something that should never be taken away, never be ignored, never be passed off as unimportant, and is very much intertwined with the concept of destiny and free will.

It is hope that allows for both the existence of destiny and of free will, no matter how contradictory that may sound. We hope for a destiny that is good to us, that it will be something we can only wish (hope again!) for it to be. We hope that we can make the right choices, we hope that we will have a real choice—that we are in control. Hope drives destiny and free will to exist in parallel, but it also drives a stake through the central heart of both concepts. 

But let’s deal with these two concepts for a moment. I don’t really have a problem with destiny, I really don’t. In my mind, free will and destiny can really coexist. What I have a bone to pick with, however, is the possible effect of my knowing of my destiny to the course that I “choose” to take in the future.

If I have a destiny, and I find out what my destiny is, does my destiny take into account the fact that I know my destiny? In other words, if I make a choice based upon my knowing of my destiny, does my destiny already reflect that? Or would my destiny change based upon my knowing of it, but wouldn’t that mean that destiny isn’t finite? Or if my destiny does take into account that I know of it, then that means that I, in fact, _needed_ to know my destiny in order to fulfill it.