1. This is it Frodo.

Nov 29, 2025

“This is it Frodo. If I take one more step, I’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.” -Me, embarking on a quest to write.

I have an interesting relationship with writing–it has been frustrating, slow, rewarding. On several occasions I’ve resolved to write more; write and you’ll learn what you think, your misconceptions or heuristics won’t have anywhere to hide. That’s where this obsidian vault came from. When I joined Brainard Lab at UCSF, I was working with a late-stage graduate student. So, as I worked to get up to speed–reading papers, considering our experiments and data in context, and really trying to build a mental model of the work, I decided to take my writing skills to task.

In my own context, this push came out of a few experiences. I think back on my calculus professor John Zweck, who used to say “memory is the residue of thought”; through some analogy I can’t precisely remember, he tied that to handwritten notes. A whirlwind of whiteboard scrawl–diagrams, equations, lists, crossouts–serves after the fact as a tool for your brain to relive and recreate those ideas; ditto for the student’s notebook. That distilled a notion that I’d come across before I can remember; I really enjoy filling a blank page.

Through the online STEM undergraduate years of the pandemic, I think so much withered–I’ve talked to many peers who feel the same way. I often put it this way: through primary school, we train for over a decade to hone a very certain skillset. Those skills fell out of use (to put it lightly) during the pandemic: studying, writing, existing as a human in the world. Coupled with a bad case of “brainfog”, so much just fell out of contention in our lives.

I definitely wrote as an undergraduate; I proudly pursued a philosophy minor, “readings” courses in UTD’s Honors College, and even a good portion of my upper-level STEM courses required some degree of writing. But in a lot of ways, I felt as if I had not authentically engaged in writing. Maybe that’s imposter syndrome talking–thinking retrospectively, I can’t help but think of this as a cognitive bias, like Neel Nanda often writes about. Indeed, on the way to graduating, I had written some thick philosophy papers, an honors thesis, and more. These were, in general, big undertakings: finished products which took painstaking time, effort, edits. When I wrote them, I treated and understood content in a different way. I realized the holes and shortcomings in my mental models.

But in the gaps between such works, I did very little writing. It never felt worthwhile–what would I even write about? Would it even be worth reading? Why should people care what I have to say? The world have given me no indication of negative responses to these questions, but the opposite. [^1] The most resounding example of this came in the review of my first paper in my upper-level philosophy course: “a model essay” and and “the best [he’d] read this term”. In general, my writing process has histortically been directed towards this type of review: I wrote and rewrote, carefully and slowly. Perfectionism and precision were the name of the game. Writing was time-intensive and effortful; not the type of activity one would pick up in their free time. Despite this, I enjoyed writing, the focus and thinking it forced me to do. I’ve realized this at various points, but never precipitated concrete change to reclaim the beauty of unforced writing.

Long story short, now is the time. Recently, I’ve been writing with greater frequency (though still not regularly), encountered a wide range of exciting fields and thoughts, and really come to appreciate the beauty of writing in general–reading some of Oliver Sacks’ early letters in particular has inspired me to take up correspondence with people I miss. [^2]

Inspired by Neel Nanda–someone who’s never met me, but nevertheless inspired me greatly, I will now make my best effort at writing some thoughts each and every day of the next month.

What I hope to get out of this:

1. Reveling in the enjoyment of thinking and writing. Neel talks about “building excitment”; I really enjoy thinking.
2. Looking past the perfectionism. In some ways (though definitely not all!) “break things fast” is a really good encapsulation of my goal here: I want to simply think and get things out; if people disagree, maybe then they’ll tell me so.
3. Practicing thought. I want to practice getting a thought out, unpolished but fully formed. Maybe more accurately, I should call this “putting words to thoughts”.
4. Also related to (2): pushing past whatever fear and anxiety keep me from doing things like this–being wrong, or pereived as a (insert whatever negative noun), or maybe just being perceived in the public marketplace of ideas at all. I’m a historically careful person, maybe too much so. In some ways, that’s a disservice to the ideas which pop up in my head but never make their ways out.
5. Conciseness and focus. This piece of writing took a while; how great would it be to chuck up a 15 minute timer and have a nice sketch or exploration of an idea in writing at the end of it? Building in focus as a sustainable habit strikes me as a really compelling potentiality.

Is this the perfect instantiation of a plan? No–it looks past my efforts to handwrite more; it overlaps with the finals period; it’s mildly ill-defined and potentially way too time-consuming. Not to mention, what if I’m actually just an idiot and my writing is perceived poorly?

But it’s a start; I’ll try and refine, and maybe get to where I want to be one day.

Footnotes

[^1] That validaton really helped me settle into the philosophy department–I almost instantaneously ceased to feel like an outsider among the terrifying, big-brained, well-read philosophy majors. [^2] But for similar reasons–perfectionism, fear of awkwardness or rejection or the guilt of ‘wasting time’–those letters have not yet left my head.