picking up the pieces

In the corner of my childhood home stood a mirror, tall and unassuming. Its modest frame captured the soft, dreamy light of lazy afternoons spent in wonder. As a wide-eyed child, I’d tiptoe before it, transforming with each glance. One day, I was a gallant astronaut from an Arthur C. Clarke novel; the next, a DaVinci-esque artist or even a molecular biologist like my parents. The mirror was more than just an assembly of wood and glass. It was my imagination’s catalyst. An open-ended portal to who I could become.

As I grew older, my eyes strained to see mirrors in the same light. Dreams of youth that once flowed as effortlessly as breath now fogged the mirrors of my imagination. The astronaut, artist, and scientist all faded. Replacing them was a person uncertain, loitering in the stillness, hoping for purpose to emerge.

There’s a shared solitude, a collective ennui, in not knowing what you’re doing. Conversations with friends always rebound to the same topics. We mull over not just our careers but also which relationships to nourish and what values to uphold. We’re all figuring it out. The quest for self-actualization is a journey as old as consciousness. While we are the authors and editors of our stories, I find comfort in knowing we’re united by a universal quest for meaning. 

For a long time, uncertainty and I had a complicated relationship. In the world of startups, I received validation, mistaking it for the genuine fulfillment I deeply sought. The pace and pressures allowed scant room for introspection. I couldn’t entirely grasp it back then, but I regularly felt afloat, like a dove endlessly circling, never landing.

Caught in a holding pattern, I clung to hope as my guiding star. I believed that if I covered my eyes and just kept sprinting, I'd surely run into purpose. Isn’t what’s meant to be, meant to be? But blind optimism alone cannot manifest destiny. Hope, while a powerful stimulant, cannot bring about purpose. In excess, it's a comfort that becomes a cage. Only when we remove our blinders can we see the turns we need to make. 

Setbacks and a sense that there was more cracked the mirror of my day-to-day, at first hardly noticeable, then unavoidably crystal. The dreamer in the mirror had become a prisoner, lost to inertia. Breaking the stagnant reflection helped me reclaim agency.

Amongst the fragments of the broken mirror, I saw glimmers of potential and hints of what might be. Some pieces were familiar—a desire to start a design studio and a love for community. Others were reclaimed ambitions, long interred beneath layers of unfounded advice, now exhumed. It was like piecing together a stained glass window, each shard a different color of my renewed dreams.

My new art studio on Broome Street is bathed in an illusory cerulean blue, a newfound space for unbridled creativity. Letters I now pen carry an inkling of magenta, embracing the vulnerability I once sidelined. My new travel itineraries are printed in my mother's favorite shade of violet, signifying a readiness to live fully and venture to places she never could.

In picking up the pieces, I’m crafting my life’s mosaic — a dynamic blossoming reflection shaped by new experiences, interests, and relationships. Hope found its rightful place here—not as a crutch but as the adhesive binding the dynamic shards of my identity. We shouldn’t see ourselves as a single monochromatic reflection but as a kaleidoscope of possibilities, pieces colored and recolored in the most brilliant hues. Such is the beauty of our mosaics.

My favorite creative works that helped me understand and think through this topic:

1. The Road Not Taken (poem) by Robert Frost
2. Rose colored glasses (video) by Raphael Bob-Waksberg
3. falling into life (essay) by Nix
4. Hope (painting) by George Frederic Watts
5. Sainte-Chapelle (architecture) by Pierre de Montreuil
6. The Alchemist (book) by Paulo Coelho