With graduation from SDSU looming on the horizon less than six months away, there’s a lot on my mind as to what comes next. In the short term, rejoining the workforce with a shiny new bachelor’s degree in hand and finding a way to pursue a master’s degree. In the long term, an uncertainty that’s been slowly chipped away by introspective rumination on my present and past circumstances. The existential pressures of age started to rear their heads years ago when I decided to return to college at the end of 2019.

A rumination that’s crossed my mind multiple times this year has been the first stories that made me: my favorite books as a child, and just how deep their influence ended up running. I started reading before grade school. I’d had exposure to reading basics in pre-school, and more importantly, strong supplemental at-home efforts by an elder sister. It was through her guidance that I was taught to read out of my collection of Walt Disney Fun-to-Read Library books. These beginning reader books were fascinating to me, stories featuring my beloved Disney characters that couldn’t be found in their TV cartoons or movies.

While this year has been spent prioritizing my academic obligations as an SDSU student, all the while I’ve also been following up on the court case against my harasser. Moving the case to the appellate court took so long that it ended up being the Fall final exams that it conflicted with. Nonetheless, I was able to get my appellant’s opening brief completed and submitted (thanks to the extensions granted) last Friday, my ungraded no-credit 4-6 unit equivalent magnum opus this year. It was filed by the reviewing court a couple days ago.

I did it. All final exams and presentations done. Opening appellant’s brief finished and filed. Final “group” written report that I ended up self-writing to about 13 pages of copy, 25 pages total with cover page/table of contents/appendices, riding the momentum from all that legal brief preparation. What I feel most is accomplished. Dealing with full-time academic course loads all year while also self-representing a case through the appeal process has felt like running two mental marathons at the same time for 11 months straight. So much pressure and stress, all kinds of mental and emotional duress, all powered through to bring me to this moment in time when I can look back on them instead of having to actively live them.

The SDSU Fall 2025 final exam period has been a capstone gauntlet on a very challenging year. Back in January, I was a fresh transfer student having just completed all of the final requirements for my associate’s degree in the summer of 2024 and applied on a whim during the final month of the admission period for the Spring 2025 semester just to see if I would even be accepted. When I accepted the offer that was extended, I took on an accelerated curriculum to ensure that I’d be eligible for graduation at the end of Spring ’26.

Last week, I had my registration appointment for next semester's classes.Yesterday, I got an email notification about the graduation application period opening.Today, I got the confirmation. It's jarring to go from the excitement of becoming a new inbound student at San Diego State University in January and find myself staring down the finality of this University student life only 11 months later. Having such a very short window in which to get to know more people and form that alma mater connection makes this current goal of lining up graduation with my upcoming milestone birthday year bittersweet.

I grew up in a time when the “boy’s don’t cry” attitude was still a prevailing and unchallenged social attitude, and with everything that happened to me in my adolescence, my response was to grow callous and rid myself of the high emotional sensitivity I had in early childhood. It certainly didn’t help that those were also times in which presenting as straight-passing was a prudent survival mechanism. In turn, this has created a high bar for art in any medium to clear, and why I highly value media that is able to elicit an emotional reaction from me.

Fear and Anxiety are what drive us to compare ourselves to others because we start deriving our sense of who we are and what our value is based on how we stand next to other people —Merlin Mann, Back to Work Episode 4 These words have stuck with me for the better part of a decade now, an idea with so much practical utility. It helps catch such thoughts as unhelpful indulgences of fear and anxiety. It helps reframe my own feelings of failure and inadequacy relative to how I feel I should be as a self-comparison to someone else that doesn't even exist.