#chaotic stem

chaotic stem academia is beautiful in a way that feels slightly self-destructive.

in notebooks full of equations written too fast, crossed out, and rewritten, solved again an hour later because suddenly they stopped making sense. in staying up too late with a desk lamp on, telling yourself one more page, one more paper, one more explanation before sleep.

in annotated printouts, in highlighted consensus statements, chargers that barely work, coffee gone cold beside a stack of books and articles, and a pen you keep picking up even though it ran out of ink yesterday, in twenty tabs open at once. in reading three explanations of the same concept and somehow feeling both smarter and more lost.

in the quiet violence of wanting to understand everything, all at once. in library silence and hospital corridors, cold mornings that begin before the sun does. in the sounds of machines, infusion pumps, in the feeling of being too tired to think and too stubborn to stop.

in the mess of learning, in understanding something only after fighting with it. in the specific kind of exhaustion that comes from staring at numbers, scans, graphs, and handwritten notes until they all start to blur into one long thread of understanding.

in the ache of carrying too many thoughts, too many questions. in learning something first with confusion, then with frustration, then with awe.

in the glow of a laptop in a room that should have gone dark hours ago. in the particular loneliness of late-night studying.

in classical music playing too softly from a speaker that crackles. in wrinkled scrubs, messy hair, ink-stained hands, and the feeling of being a little haunted by everyone you are trying to save - and everyone you didn´t. in the strange intimacy of trying to map out exactly how and why a body is failing while your own body is running on willpower and caffeine.

in kind professors with sharp minds and tenderness that inspires curiosity and love for that specific field, subject or research. in mentors who make difficult things feel survivable. in people who scribble explanations on a page for you. in the quiet miracle of someone saying "look again, you´re closer than you think".

in realizing that intelligence is not always clean or elegant, sometimes it is obsessive and tired, a little unwell and unbearably sincere. in the panic, too, of realizing you forgot something obvious. in going back, in checking again.

in the romance of becoming the kind of person who looks at chaos and insists on meaning, who looks at suffering and insists on care, who keeps reading, keeps asking, keeps circling back even when the night is too long and the answers still refuse to come.