I Swear You Will Be Fine

Dear Josh,

The next few months are about to get busier for me, but I think busy is good. Although I wasn’t super free for the past couple of months – I still had school and there was consistently work to be done – but I spent a lot of my time reading. I really like reading. It’s one of the few things I can do for hours without feeling bored. TV shows don’t capture my attention like that. I’m also convinced that one can learn a lot by reading. Whether you are reading fiction, non-fiction, poetry… I think there can be a lot of takeaways in every genre. I’m currently reading a book that allows for the discussion of morality and toxicity. And at every interesting point of the book where something comes to mind, I think about how we enjoyed having these discussions.

I’m currently in the midst of data collection for my thesis. I wonder what you would have chosen to write about. I’m doing a paper on fluid intelligence, self-compassion, emotional stability, and academic burnout. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say what I wanted to do originally, but it looks like I’m about to say it anyway. I thought long and hard about what I could focus on. I’ve always been interested in trauma and most clinical disorders, and after you passed, I developed a stronger interest in personality disorders as well as grief. I hope to specialize in trauma, grief, and personality disorders in the future, but I also possess a very keen interest in intelligence. I wanted to do something that reminds me of you or honors you in a certain way, but it was going to be quite challenging because my interests had to align with my supervisor’s interests too.

My original idea was to study grief, but I would have required a large pool of grieving individuals. I can hear you say I have access to them, but it seemed a bit insensitive to ask everyone who knew you to participate in my study. Furthermore, the ethical risks associated with interacting with grieving individuals is considerably higher (ethics would never approve of my study). Then I thought harder about you. What are some traits you possess that might have led to our outcome?

I did think of something related to Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Could I help those with BPD through my research? Sadly, I could not do clinical disorders because my supervisor was not keen on labelling individuals. And again, I would have required a large batch of people with diagnosed BPD or other disorders and not only do I not have access to them, but ethics would never have approved because of the associated risks. I had to drop that idea too. I guess I can only help them in the future.

Then I thought about your brain! Intelligence is something we both enjoyed, and I often wondered if individuals with high intelligence experience lower life satisfaction for various reasons. Existing research did not give me a concrete answer to that question, so I thought it was a direction worth heading in. That’s how I landed on intelligence and life satisfaction. After some discussions with my supervisor, who did not know my real reasons for wanting to do intelligence and life satisfaction, my topic was narrowed. He said that both intelligence and life satisfaction as constructs were too broad (which I agreed), so we decided to focus on fluid intelligence (I imagine you’re very high in this too), and academic burnout.

This fluid intelligence and academic burnout model on its own was too simple for my liking, so I added self-compassion (something I wish you had more of) and emotional stability (this was a conversation we frequently had). We did a self-reporting test once on personality traits and the results showed that you perceived yourself to have very low emotional stability. You also said that you were envious of my level of emotional stability. That’s how the construct came to mind.

And that is how I found myself doing a study on fluid intelligence, emotional stability, self-compassion, and academic burnout. Of course, the model is a lot more complicated than this – there are relationships I’m not fully explaining – but this is how I derived the constructs. With your help, technically. I remember a conversation I had with your mum earlier this year when I was finalizing my topic. I told her what I was planning on doing and she said, “I thought you wanted to do something on grief.” I don’t know why I didn’t explain this entire thought process to her. I ended up just casually saying it was difficult to and I’m interested in intelligence. There’s a lot more of you in my project than I let on. I don’t know why it took me so long to write about it.

I can’t wait to see you again. I love you more, always, and forever.

Love always,
Sha