Resting Time.
April 2025
Happy end of April! I’m happy to report that my eye is feeling better and recovery is looking up! Read more about my goal to document my monthly thoughts here. Enjoy!
Resting time.
I spent a record amount of time this month with my eyes closed.
Because of my ongoing eye infection, I’d wake up at 9 am, work until 5 pm, go to bed at 8 pm, and fall asleep at 11. In those three hours from 8 to 11, I’d lie in bed cocooned—covers pulled to my chin and a navy blue, silk heated eye mask sealed over my eyes. No lights. No podcast. Just my mind, wrestling with itself.
And can I just say, I’ve had the most fun, creative, and energizing thoughts I’ve had in a while.
One of those nights, after I’d cocooned myself in bed, I found myself replaying a conversation with a friend—one where we talked about the meaning of ambition. I began to picture the lives of people I consider definitively ambitious.
Does an ambitious person walk from street to street with a swift impatience?
Are their everyday thoughts laced with a restless need to learn?
Do their words reveal more about who they hope to become than who they are now?
And somewhere in the search to find the animations and sounds of ambition, a memory came back to me: a Frank Ticheli band piece I played in middle school—Portrait of A Clown.
A piece where our task was to help the audience hear the whistles and honks, the teeter-tattering walks, and the bright polka-dotted blouse of—a clown.
What if I swapped out the woodwinds for prose? Replaced the clown with a subject I enjoy studying? How would I write the portrait of someone in my life?
Would I capture the way they introduced themselves to me?
Describe how they talked about the people in their life?
Or quite literally detail the lines and shadows on their cheeks when they smiled?
Maybe I’d describe the warmth of their bear hugs.
Or the intensity of their tiger eyes.
What if I flipped the whole thing? What if I wrote portraits of nonhumans as humans?
I visualized my seven plants on their Victorian shelf, all of whom I’ve given human names.
Saoirse, the girl who was pushed into the light but found her true magentas in the shade.
Debussy, the boy who was given his brother’s terracotta shoes and grew into them day by day.
How incredible it would be to walk through a gallery—not of paintings, but of writing. Portraits of people, places, and objects written by people all over the world, with phrases I’ve never heard, words I’ve never seen, and cadences I’ve never felt.
I saw myself on the Muni, reading through scrolls of creative writing—canon, amateur, unfinished.
Something Pinterest-like. To discover writing snippets and save ones I loved. To add my own notes on moments that felt special as inspiration for my next writing piece. To explore ways to play with the portrait idea and, in the process, find new writing exercises to write and write.
Enough to fill a coffee table book—one I could call my own. I could see it behind my eyelids: an ivory cloth cover, resting on the acrylic table in my living room. A few copies tucked beside Saoirse and Debussy.
Yet another project I wanted to work on when my eye heals.
I want to write.
I want to code.
I want to read, develop taste in writing.
Talk to people, share my work. Go outside.
Look into the sun and go for a run.
I lay on my bed starfish side up.
Arms pinned to my sheets.
Eyes squeezed tight.
A prisoner in my own body.
Gated from myself, to free my body to heal.
I exhale.
An exhale letting go of the feeling that I never have enough time in this life. An acknowledgement that this feeling is natural, and it’s okay.
To want to work on something meaningful and build a thriving social community.
To be active and in nature, and to also have taste in arts and opinions about the world.
To craft invaluable relationships all while prioritizing my health and recovery.
I can want all of these things. And I will.
But for now, I am forgiving that I am not at my full capacity and won’t be for a while.
I relax my eyes and let my arms sink into the bed.
It’s funny.
Once my eyeball heals, I’ll start watching those videos again.
Those never-ending videos of today’s ever-growing number of “average person,” non-celebrity influencers sharing what a reachable, ideal life looks like—starting with me sauntering into the bathroom in a monogrammed robe, opening my cabinet to a double cleansing routine, and a three-ingredient green juice decorated with an amber glass straw.
It’s funny because—just a couple thoughts ago—I had dreamed up all these beautiful, weird, whimsical writing projects.
I don’t need some dingy algorithm to tell me what I want in life.
I want to dictate what content I see, and who I want to be.
Like the days where you’d first sign up to Twitter and choose the bubbles you liked—college basketball, San Francisco politics, creative writing.
I chose what I wanted to see.
Not some compute in the middle of Virginia.
I chose what I wanted to see—
and, inadvertently, who I wanted to be.
We don’t need more “I never thought I would want to watch Italian voiceovers of two-word prompt, AI-generated images but now I’m laughing so hard and I can’t stop haha” moments.
If we just shut our eyes and let our decades of memories bounce around our 86 billion neurons, we can enjoy having beautiful, raw, unthought thoughts—instead of converging to the minds and bodies of the few thousand people that permeate 21-second videos on the internet.
I started keeping a journal next to my pillow. For the moments my thoughts were so vibrant, I felt the impulse to unheat my eye, just for a second—not to see the world, but to capture the world I saw behind my eyes.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading my April inner monologue. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.
A special shoutout to my friend Lucas for always nudging me to do the things I want to do and to my friends, my sister, and my mom for continuously helping me in my recovery :)
Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:
I have come to this conclusion that work fulfillment comes from 1) feeling proficient 2) feeling impactful and 3) being able to express yourself.
I’m noticing how much my parents enjoy reading about businesses, and I would love to help them get out of the textbook and create something that they own.
Read the original motivation for my this writing project here:
another hit piece
You cleverly brainwashed me into being a founder and now it’s time to convince our parents!