I have left a past behind to start a new life. My new life starts with me. I am tired of starting from other people's expectations, making goals and even achieving them for the accolades and acceptance of those around me. I came to the least likely place to encounter friends and family. My psychological makeup is in such a way I had always presumed other people's responses and their expectations are more valid than mine. I had gone a way along this way, sidelining the things I feel are important to bring to fruits results that neither please me nor displease me, even though I am perfectly guilty to yearn for people's responses. How their opinions would become my life's focus I don't really know. I thought in paving a route to academic success would lead me somewhere in life. My parents, that was all they demanded from me. Going to Cornell, studying architecture, something I have never had an interest in, seemed like the correct path. My parents were immensely pleased. But one more time, I could develop no interest in creating architecture in the way they were teaching it. Although now an actual interest of mine, architecture is, I think I would not find happiness in this way.  Success and happiness are not the same thing; sometimes one is confused with the other. Happiness is starting with myself and slowly and deliberately collect fragments in pieces what interests me and makes me feel elated. It's kinda like love, I boldly conjecture. In your heart you know. At Cornell, I switched out of architecture, though still immersed in friends' projects which I looked upon with admiration and which sometimes called me to be in an honored position as critic. I switched to the School of Arts and Sciences, expecting to explore and find something that empassioned me. Much was interesting, and I carried a full curriculum every semester, sometimes working two jobs, and partied. Partying was an expression of seeking happiness in the other - I was fully aware that it was not to last and may carry detrimental effects. I had not told any of this to my Grandma, but she still insightfully remarked, but you graduated. I didn't realize it was an achievement because my heart was not in it. Beside the partying, which I felt was otherly and so enjoyable to be intoxicated with literal intoxicants but also social freedom. Maybe graduating was an achievement of sorts, but I felt like there are more and more boxes around me, and as I looked into the future, I saw them closing in on me. I don't want my life to be over before it began. Life, being at peace with oneself, doing something that means something to oneself, encountering people before putting up a facade, sincere even if disagreement occur, because it is one's own. There is very little time, yet life is a miracle, an extremely improbable event or phenomenon, so very precious. There is no doubt we live in societies and communities.  There are rules and conventions, but nobody has held a gun to my head and insist on how I should live. I have not been enslaved, but only by my own preconceptions.  Dare to look outside, I tell myself, can I find people who are in pursuit of the life they are seeking, but how many of these people can see beyond what they have constructed around themselves. Are they conventional lifes, repeated across well meaning folks, but have they seen beyond. We live in an informational society here anyway, the lens with which to view the world can vary: which lens are you looking through? Are there ways to see with your own naked eye, and see the universe and your living in this ever grander world in a moment's mind's eye?