For most of 2021, I’ve felt like I was in some sort of writing rut. I didn’t write an essay for my newsletter on January 21, the first time I skipped a newsletter since September. The ideas just failed to come to me, I wondered if the well of writing had run dry — that I’d exhausted all of the things that I could possibly say with my limited range of experience.

I used to regularly add my commentary to articles on my tumblr as I read, as a way to track what I read and just reflect on what I was consuming. Let’s try that again Link to Original Piece This is an absolutely killer profile of a Pakistani-American writer named Ayad Akhtar that I didn’t know about. Reading it was a thrill, for standard “representation reasons,” since it’s rare to see multiple identities of mine (Punjabi + writer + strong fascination with religion) line up with anyone I see on a big stage.

What does it mean to know yourself? Is it uncovering a unique set of views or ideas or beliefs that exist independently of any external influence? That is, is anything about me my own creation, or am I fully a product of the world I was born and raised in? And so, is it ever possible to fully know myself, or can I just figure out a set of preferences that were subconsciously formed at the intersection of people, culture, and community in my life?