flâneur

Do not love half lovers - by Ashley Zhang

ashleydzhang.substack.com · 967 words · saved by 1 readers

For as long as I can remember, my life has been a tug-of-war between dueling desires. Growing up, my parents — both engineers by trade — would warn of my demise if I did not study something “practical”: computer science, finance, business, medicine, law. Over dinner, they’d ask my younger brother, only half in jest, whether he would take me in if I became a broke writer, with nothing to my name but a mouth full of witticisms and a heart full of unrealized dreams. For years, I tried to mold myself in the image of others’ ideals. In high school, I gritted my teeth and took more science than literature courses because they were perceived as more intellectually rigorous; in college, I switched my major half a dozen times in an attempt to find one that was sufficiently “pre-professional” but did not completely strangle my soul. Everything I loved — the stories and ideas and questions about humanity that tugged at my mind — seemed like frivolous indulgences that could not serve as the center

Caspar David Friedrich, The Tree of Crows (1822) Dear friend, For as long as I can remember, my life has been a tug-of-war between dueling desires. Growing up, my parents — both engineers by trade — would warn of my demise if I did not study something “practical”: computer science, finance, business, medicine, law. Over dinner, they’d ask my younger brother, only half in jest, whether he would take me in if I became a broke writer, with nothing to my name but a mouth full of witticisms and a heart full of unrealized dreams. For years, I tried to mold myself in the image of others’ ideals.…

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