January, '26

the artist archives, 001

The Great Masquerade

This January brought the annual panic of the new year to my doorstop, that feeling that I really ought to ‘rebrand my life’ & wake up at 4:30 every morning & subsist on a nature defying low calorie/high protein regime & somehow find fulfillment in unyielding productivity. The winter months naturally beckon the soul into reflection on one’s strengths and weaknesses, yet it is so easy to become so obsessed with ‘reinventing yourself’ that you forget who you actually are. Learning, or perhaps accepting, who you are is far more difficult than masquerading as someone you are not. Yet, while you are still pretending and trying to force yourself into routines, relationships, or careers that don’t utilize your infinitely particular gifts, you will never be fulfilled.

I’ve been pondering the issue of self-integrity since a conversation with a friend of mine in the first few days of 2026. I was expounding upon the seemingly infinite ways in which I need to muscle up and change when [redacted] stopped me, insisting there’s a difference between pushing yourself and extinguishing yourself. “We’re called to perfect who we are, that is—who God created,” he said, “so be careful. Your brain may tell you you need to fix something when it’s really a part of how you’re created and just needs tweaking. Perfect who you are, but don’t change yourself completely.”

I wrote it down immediately and stuck it to my wall: Perfect who you are, but don’t change yourself completely. Transform your weaknesses into strengths, continually grow and mature and pursue excellence in all you do, but don’t erase your identity. The first obvious step is to know thyself—beyond mere likes and dislikes.

Socrates knew what he was about when he said that an unexamined life is not worth living, that one of the most noble tasks we can undertake is to truly know and understand ourselves. The problem is, we expect to know right away. We expect it to be one of the easier things to unravel in our lives… but it isn’t. Human beings are never perfect but rather infinitely perfectible, as my high school philosophy teacher once expressed. We are masters of growth, evolution, and adaptation; yet we are constantly changing. The core elements of our personality certainly remain constant, but even so, they develop and shift as we age and pedal through different seasons of our lives. There is something both eternal and transient about who we are.

one of the many domes of Saint Peter’s Basilica, 01.30.26

On A Journey, Eager

In the last few days of January my Christmas break came to a close. I packed my bags once again and boarded a plane to Rome, Italy, to study abroad for the semester with the rest of my sophomore class and other students from a fellow Catholic college. Last week we stood huddled around our professor on the Gianicolo Hill. The hill is named after Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, transitions, and endings. It felt appropriate, gazing out over the Eternal City with so much ahead of us. “You are people on The Way,” Dr. Connell said, stone blue eyes piercing into ours. “You are at the beginning of a journey, and you are students.”

We discussed that the English word “student” comes from the Latin studeo, studere, meaning “to study” or “to be eager.” To be a student on pilgrimage in Rome is to be on a journey, eager. It’s impossible not to have this eagerness—walking through balmy sunshine and palm trees, green parrots swooping and squawking overhead. I have only been in Rome for five days and already it’s beginning to feel like home. Everyday I learn more Italian and have more of a hunger to use it; I like the way the words slide off the tongue and one’s voice involuntarily takes a deep, spicy tone just to say Buongiornio each morning. A map of the city is forming in my mind; the man who owns the flower stand on the way to the coffee bar says, “Buongiornio, carrissima!” when I and a friend walk past in the windy morning.

first Italian cappuccino outside of a small cafe in Monteverde, 01.31.26

Something about a foreign city and language has forced me into myself. I see myself in my awkwardness ordering a cappuccino and cornetto in grammatically distraught Italian, in my first few shots of limoncello, in the long, laughter-dominant conversations around the dinner table with classmates I am seeing with new eyes. Yet, as I wander through the city, getting lost on purpose just to see more of the thousand hidden wonders, I am coming to see that not knowing everything about who I am or where I’m heading isn’t defective. I am a person on The Way, on a journey through Rome and through my life, and I am eager.

When I was in the sixth grade, my theology teacher had a photograph of the Gloria Window (pictured above) in his classroom. Seeing it in St. Peter’s eight years later was surreal. 01.30.26

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