Gatsby, Logos, and What Makes Us Feel Alive

Time moves differently in second year. It speeds up. It spills over. The days are fuller, heavier, but they hold me completely.

The documentary unit in film has been something else entirely. I was both DP and editor for our project on dance, and it felt like moving inside a dream. We spent days in sunlit studios, watching dancers warm up at the barre, their movements fluid, deliberate, entirely outside the logic of speech. The choreographers spoke in a language of gestures, and we filmed them, wide-eyed, capturing something ephemeral—what is it about movement, or music, or rhythm, that makes us feel alive? We’d discuss this question over and over and every answer was valid.

The road trip to the coastal towns was something different—a softer, slower kind of magic. Just us, a crew of girls, asking strangers about dance, about music, about the ways we all find ourselves in movement. The light changed as we traveled, golden and thick, and the documentary took on a softness, a poetry of its own.

And then, for the drama scripts, my mine was chosen.

I wasn’t expecting it. And I definitely wasn’t expecting to have to direct it. It was a darker script—a scene pulled from a thriller mystery which is so not my theme but I surprisingly loved writing it. A runaway, a character named Ludo, lost and searching. And for weeks, we were inside that world. Location scouting mishaps, rewrites on the fly, actors breathing life into the lines I wrote in the quiet of my own room. To watch my dialogue exist beyond the page, spoken out loud, was something close to magic.

Meanwhile, philosophy has cracked my mind open in an entirely new way. I picked up a minor in Philosophy almost on a whim, and now I spend three-hour Logos lectures sitting in circles, debating ethics and moral relativism, writing essays on the spot like my brain is on trial. We discuss Nietzsche, Camus, Kierkegaard, the weight of meaning, or the absence of it. Some nights, I drive home with the radio off because my mind is too loud, filled with static, with spirals of thought that don’t land anywhere but demand to be followed.

Rob Brezsny had said that somewhere in the world there is a treasure that has no value to anyone but you, and a secret that is meaningless to everyone except you, and a frontier that possesses a revelation only you will know how to put to good use. To go in search of those things.

And this year, we moved to Milsons Point. My new room overlooks Lavender Bay, and I swear, I live inside a Fitzgerald novel. I saw The Great Gatsby in cinemas, and now I look out at the green signal light across the bay at night when I can’t sleep, and I can’t quite say why, but it makes me feel like Gatsby himself. Like something is waiting.

Tim, our concierge, has become something of a character in my life. He hides my packages behind the desk just to see the delight on my face when he reveals them.

When I take the train, it’s three stops instead of thirteen. I feel like a real city girl now, walking through station tunnels, ordering a ‘usual’ coffee on the go, slipping into the rhythm of something faster. I love a change of environment. I actually just love change.

On weekends, I drive to Manly or Balmoral Beach, the ocean like a page of blue silk, stretched endless. I’ve developed an affinity for plays, and the Ensemble Theatre has become a second home. Some days, I wonder if I could be an actress. I still recite monologues from past semesters, whispering them under my breath as I walk along the harbor, my voice carrying through the sea air.

Writing still keeps me grounded. The creative, the critical, the essays I submit early because I live half my life in the library. One of my film units is entirely on media history, and it feels like time travel, slipping in and out of different eras, past voices, past visions of what storytelling could be.

But this second year—it has been different. It has been faster, fuller, richer.

Some nights, I am exhausted. But it’s an exhaustion that settles in your bones, that you can see, that you can point to. Late nights flat on the floor of the editing lab, my eyes stinging, my fingers moving across the keyboard in the rhythm of shortcuts and timelines, imports and exports, entire worlds living on my screen.

And then there is love. Unspoken, unreturned. Or maybe just the feeling of being nineteen, still feeling fifteen, but so relieved I no longer am.

Lunch breaks standing in the courtyard, my hair long enough to reach my lower back. Classes that feel larger than life, even though I know they are just as temporary as high school. But still, they are mine. This moment is mine.

And even though I know I will step out of it one day, it doesn’t make it any less significant.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.