Thrown Into Time

This essay will come to you not as a definitive plan because the future itself is never a fixed endpoint—we are always becoming, always engaged in the process of making sense of our being. This is what Martin Heidegger believes in his novel Being and Time. In Being and Time, Heidegger explains that we’re shaped by how we exist in time—our past, present, and future all intertwined together. To live authentically, we must recognize that life is short, choices matter, and we’re always becoming who we are through how we engage with time.

So, my future––what if, suppose that, if only, I will––is nothing but simply a hypothetical. It’s hypothetical I will complete this essay, and it’s hypothetical you’ll be reading this. It’s hypothetical that tonight I will be photographing Mock Shaadi from 6–11 p.m., that it’ll be my last RSO event to photograph before graduating.

What’s not hypothetical is my past––what was, it seemed, it had, I did––because what was a standing future is now completed and done with. Like it seemed to be the right choice to declare law as my new profession this past summer. But this is not to be confused with viewing the past as just merely a completed fact. And what’s not hypothetical is right now, living in between past and present, thinking about both. It’s an active engagement. My future is dependent on my past. The past is tricky. But as Heidegger says, what we make of our past depends on how we project ourselves into our future. And then my present relies on both. To plan, project, my life forward without the usage of one would be a failing plan.

“Thrownness” (Past)––being "thrown" into a world not of our choosing; into a particular time, place, culture, and set of circumstances.

It’d be a fail to try to plan my life forward without thinking about how I was thrown into this world where I would never know who my biological parents are. That I’d rather have parents on the older side because, in their mid-forties, they decided to adopt me from China at the age of three after losing their son. They’re both nearly seventy, whereas I’m only turning twenty-two in a month. They are both Chinese, like me, so I’ve grown lucky to be adopted into a family where I wouldn’t have to struggle grappling with my identity. This also means I grew up understanding the struggles of being Asian, through my own experience, but also through my parents who both grew up in America differently.

My father grew up in Boston Chinatown. My mother in Dorchester. While Chinatown was built with the intentional purpose of segregation, my father was luckier to live there than my mother. Dorchester, at the time, was dominantly Irish. At least my father had a clustered area where they were guaranteed to be unbothered, and to have grown closely with his neighborhood that was just like his family. There was “only” a crossing line they couldn’t pass before they would go after them.

My mother didn’t have anywhere safe. She was in a white town (at the time) where she stood out as the little Asian girl who lived with her Chinese father who owned a laundromat. When I was younger, I thought her past story was simply about growing up in a laundry store. But even more so than the robbery of their store, my mother never failed to emphasize this repeated experience: “And then, as my father and I would be going down the streets, leaving the store, they [the Irish] would call, ‘There goes the chinky father and daughter again!’” I realize this was the heart of her upbringing.

Both my parents learned how to survive differently. In ways that would make one fearless and the other still fearful. My mother is the fearless. There is no point in being quiet, in suffering. My father is the fearful. There is always someone to please out there. Staying silent and agreeing is his only tactic so they can like us––stay out of the way of them, be unproblematic.

Yes, my current life and beyond would fall flat if I didn’t carry with me the fire in my mother’s voice when she says, “Well, fuck them and what they want from us”—because that fire didn’t just shape her survival; it’s shaping the way I step forward, personally.

“Being-Towards-Death” (Present)––the way we exist with an awareness of our mortality

Much of my life has been guided through my mother’s voice, her perspective. This is something I’ve grown to appreciate the older I get––once I started to see beyond my mom’s strong opinions, which sometimes don’t align with my generation’s values, are shaped by her past experiences. Her voice that I continue to hear in the back of my head is something that is shaping my core values, moral beliefs, and boundaries for myself that I, right now, feel are what’s right.

Sometimes––more often now as I feel, at times, paralyzed by the stress of graduating and the uncertainty of what comes next––I’m challenged to wonder if I’ll ever know what’s right for my future. I think, right now, that law school will be, hypothetically, what’s next for me. But in between are a subset of steps to bridge here to there to make that future true. Like right now, I am thinking a lot about finding a temporary job during my gap year before applying for law school. I’m searching for writing internships, paralegal positions, legal volunteering, anything that ties closely to my English degree or career path. It feels like a must, making me think very competitively and comparatively of myself to others; I must do this (find a job, because our culture today says it’s how I measure my worth) to get that (law school). That there is this ladder to follow. This pressure I strongly feel feeds into a sense of imposter syndrome and makes me feel like any deviation from the plan means failure.

This mindset ties back to what Heidegger calls thrownness—the idea that we’re all born into a world we didn’t choose, with certain expectations, circumstances, and histories already in place. I didn’t choose this pressure to “figure it all out,” but I’m in it, and now I must work with it. According to Heidegger, we’re always projecting ourselves into the future—what he calls being-toward-possibility—but the challenge is to do that while also staying grounded in the present. This is where I struggle and often feel like I’m trying to live in two timelines: present and future; one that counts now and one that stands as a mysterious open end.

While I’ve been trying to plan my gap year and find meaningful work, studying for the LSAT has become its own kind of emotional struggle. I thought I’d be ready to test this past winter and wasn’t. Then thought perhaps June. Once again, my practice scores are discouraging. So now, hypothetically, July is when I’ll take the test. As challenging as this test is, I’ve told myself I won’t take it until I’m consistently reaching the score I want—even if that means waiting over a year and missing an application cycle. I don’t usually let statistics define my worth, but with my science courses, my GPA will still be judged alongside law applicants who weren’t in STEM at all. Obtaining a high LSAT score is how I can offset this. My science background comes from me originally thinking I’d go to medical school, but I’ve since shifted to law. That change completely altered my timeline. Law school is three years, compared to roughly eight years of medical school, residency, and fellowship combined. It means I might be done with school in my twenties instead of my late thirties. But even with that change, I still plan with the awareness that time isn’t unlimited. So, the question keeps coming back: how far ahead can I plan without becoming detached from my present life? How do I cope with the fear of not having full control over my future? What if I never get the score I want? What if I don’t get into law school? What if I can’t even find a temporary job this summer? What if I’m just not good enough for everything I’m hoping for?

My mother knows she can’t stop the stress I feel with my future. She very much knows this is my life at the very end, but she still helps in her indirect ways. She sends me photos of all her new pottery creations. Some of them become her new favorites, and some of them she ends up smashing, recycling that clay, for something better. Often, following this sequence, she’ll tell me that after graduation I’ll get to spend some days of my week doing pottery with her. I can make my earrings I’ve always wanted to try, make more mugs, and practice more on the wheel. Or she’ll remind me of the time I’ll have to progress in my photography; take on bigger bookings like weddings.

Many of my hobbies are derivatives from her creative soul. She lives a life where she indulges herself in creative hobbies that I eventually pick up on. But behind the hobbies she passes down to me is a message I’ve realized: don’t only live for what’s coming after. There’s privilege I have here in front of me, too. I’m young and able to do things I may not be able to do when I’m older. Or perhaps, before an unexpected event could happen. But at the end of all this, she hardly brings up the idea of me working over the summer, and perhaps it’s because she views this “ladder” to life differently. At times, it’s conflicting to hear her words toward me, like “I don’t care if you find a job [right now] …I have no doubt you will be well off financially. You will be working for the rest of your life once you graduate law school.” To any child, hearing this from your parent is a relief––to know the pressure is fully from myself and this society. But at my weak moments of desperation, and complete stress, I just want to tell her, “You don’t get it.”

But I know she gets it. And that I just become a stressed, irrational person. I have to step back and view her words through the lens of motherhood. I remember that she, too, is just another person like me trying to use her past, her thrownness, to navigate what’s best for now for the best future––for her daughter’s best overall life. She is thinking and sharing her wisdom with me as a mother who knows time is never guaranteed for anyone. Anything can come to an uninviting end at any point in time. She reminds me of this with her regret of not letting her son go on the vacation he wanted to go on. Money and time was the reason why. Then shortly after, he passed away. So, if there is something I want to invest myself in, even if it means going off-track of my career plans, she tells me to go for it.

My mother is my living Martin Heidegger. Both she and Heidegger encourage me to live authentically—to choose how I exist, rather than letting the world decide for me. Again, she’s saying “who cares what they want, and how they expect you to carve your pathway.” I want my life to include law school, but also the things that make me feel whole right now: photography, writing, ceramics. Every choice I make—whether it’s studying, working, or making space for my hobbies—is part of shaping the life I want to live. I still struggle to balance the present and the future, but I’m learning that living with intention doesn’t mean abandoning ambition. It means not putting off life until some imagined endpoint. It means using my time in ways that feel meaningful now, knowing that life is short and unpredictable.