I’ve been thinking about how long it takes for an experience to ripen into nostalgia. For me, the threshold seems to hover around five years. I’m 29 now, in 2025, and nothing about 2024, 2023, 2022, or even 2021 tugs at any sentimental thread. Those years feel too close, too loud, still humming with the static of embarrassment. But something shifts as I look back to 2020, 2019, 2018, and then farther still, all the way to 1999, where my earliest memories sit like small, preserved artifacts. It makes me wonder whether nostalgia is not a property of time but a marker of internal distance—a sign that I’ve crossed some inner border and become someone unfamiliar to the person who lived those early chapters.

Just as we remember events, we also seem to remember modes of being—a certain texture of consciousness, a distinct sense of living inside my Cartesian theater instead of anyone else’s. These impressions arrive in segments. One segment can feel tenderly toward another, but when the borders between them are still porous, embarrassment leaks through. When the voice of an old self still echoes faintly in the inner corridors, it feels almost as if someone else is still lodged in my mind. Only after enough time has passed do the distinct senses of selves recede away from each other, far enough to be regarded with nostalgia rather than discomfort.

I’ve started calling these past segments “ghosts”: discrete, finite, enumerable chapters of my identity that linger like the afterimages of selves long expired.

If anything defines who I am, it is the patterning of my thought—the way one thought strikes another, the idiosyncratic arcs they trace in response to the world. We all recoil the same way when we stub a toe on a doorframe, but the mind’s response to an unexpected question from a stranger is something else entirely: a private signature, a distinctive reflex of personality.

I felt compelled to write all this down, to better understand what it feels like to observe—from a long distance—the various ghosts that once inhabited my body. In adulthood, I can trace three broad patterns of thought, three phases of mind: one from about ages 17 to 25, another from 25 to 28 or 29, and a third beginning now, at 29. Each phase marks a shift in two dimensions: how I understood myself, and how I moved among other people.

Why do these transitions happen? Are they the inevitable metamorphoses of a person in their twenties? Or were they transformations born from shifting preferences combined with the slow disillusionment of academic life? I’m not sure.

What I do know is that the first phase of my inner life was self-centered, fussy, socially unnatural, infused with a dramatic sense of “why I am here on this planet,” and yet simultaneously arrogant, proud, detached from reality, afraid, and overly tethered to my parents. At the same time, this ghost brimmed with ideals, ambitions, and a competitive fire. Pleasant? Hardly. But undeniably alive.

The second phase was a confused ghost—trying on a parade of transient identities, none of which fit for longer than a season.

This was when I began to see, with painful clarity, the mismatch between the academic life I had imagined and the one that actually existed. The issues weren’t about reasoning—everyone agrees on rigor—but about authority. Who decides what questions I may ask? Who dictates the projects I am allowed to work on? The answers came from the quiet machinery of hierarchy.

Disillusioned—because I had once believed that rigor guaranteed freedom—I realized I had been wrong. I could pursue only what I was permitted to pursue, often projects so mundane they dulled the edges of curiosity. A faint urge to reinvent myself began to take shape. I could join the practical world, find a stable path like everyone else, or continue living as the idealist I had been. The result was a 4–5 year period, from 2021 to 2025, marked by confusion and intellectual turbulence.

This was also the time when I drifted toward the arts, returned occasionally to my private physics obsessions, and wandered through projects assigned by academic seniors that led nowhere. Yet this period, confused as it was, also produced a more personal identity—one detached from inherited roles, reshaped morally, socially, and existentially.

After many storms, I now seem to have entered a third phase—a steadier shape of self. I know who I am intellectually, and I know how I intend to use the abilities I have, regardless of circumstance: as a hybrid creature—part practical, part idealist—whose idealism no longer clings solely to physics but also extends toward the arts. At the same time, I’ve become pragmatic. I now feel a clear calling: to make a living through teaching, in all its forms, and to let my creative and intellectual impulses breathe outside institutional constraints. I want peer review, not permission. I want curiosity, not grants or tenure. Research, I think, should never become a job; it should remain an act of wonder.

This brings me back to the thread I left earlier—the parallel metamorphoses in how I related to people, which unfolded alongside the intellectual ones.

Through my teens and early twenties, I had constructed my identity around celibacy—believing, quite naively, that “truth seekers” must renounce attachment. I held unexamined, often negative assumptions about women and relationships, inherited from a conservative, patriarchal upbringing that I no longer recognize as my own.

Around 25, I decided to give romance a try—perhaps because solitude had begun to feel hollow. Perhaps because my intellectual disillusionment made me question the costs of devoting myself to truth-seeking at the expense of everything else. Why sacrifice so much, when the pursuit itself was nothing like the romantic ideal I’d imagined, nor was it particularly valued in the environment I occupied?

So began a second phase in my personal life: one marked by confusion, as I realized I understood almost nothing about love. Even from a distance, love seemed mysterious—something meaningful in ways that had nothing to do with reproduction.

But shifting into romantic openness is not an “on/off switch” for someone who once viewed relationships in strictly utilitarian terms. It required a deep restructuring of my inner world, the part of my identity that governs my position relative to others. And like my intellectual transformation, this one took years—about 4–5, coinciding with the same span and calander years it took for my intellectual identity to stabilize.

During these years, I was socially and romantically inexperienced—overthinking, overcorrecting, behaving in contrived and emotionally mismatched ways.

After many hellos and many goodbyes, I feel I have finally settled into a stable social identity—one built from scratch, guided by good influences, and unburdened by the bad ones, including the ghosts of my upbringing. Those influences now echo like distant, fading howls. I feel at ease with people from all walks of life. I feel, in a way I never had before, moral and existentially secure.

It strikes me that many personal transformations have the same contour: you begin with confidence, lose it, and eventually return to yourself in a different, mellower way. My own journey seems to fit that pattern. I left who I was, wandered for years, and came back changed — not dramatically, but enough to recognize the distance.