Wow, it sure has been a while since I’ve last posted—about half a year, in fact. The last time I wrote on here, I shared that my younger brother Jude was diagnosed with cancer for the second time. When I’ve shared about his first cancer experience, I mentioned that finding another bone marrow donor would be incredibly difficult considering Jude and I are mixed race. But miraculously, we found another donor who was also a perfect match—a woman in Germany. Jude had his marrow transplant in the beginning of September, and since then, everything has been looking pretty good.

As for the rest of my life, senior year of high school has been… an experience for sure. While junior year was incredibly stressful because of my classes and extracurriculars (I blame you, AP Physics!), senior year has been a small sigh of relief—most of the classes I’m taking are classes that truly interest me, I spend less actual time in class since most of my classes are four days a week instead of five days, and there’s just less general wailing and gnashing of teeth since first semester of senior year is one of the lightest course loads I’ve had since freshman year (although the flip side of that is that I have a much heavier course load—one of my heaviest ones—in the spring)!

But despite that, my classes are still harder than last year, and college applications have been eating me alive from the inside. I’m so incredibly excited about going to college next year, but I just don’t want to actually do the applications—writing essays and stressing out about resumes and activities aren’t exactly super fun. I applied to my first-choice school just yesterday, and I’m now just waiting until December to hear back from them so my fingers are crossed and I’m hoping for the best! (Also, if you happen to be an admissions officer from said school, I would be overjoyed if you accepted me!)

Yet even in the craziness that is the college admissions cycle, I’ve had a chance to really reflect on what I find personally important in my life—things like writing, advocacy work, and volunteering. And now that I must resign myself to a little over a month and a half of waiting for a decision, I’ll at least have the chance to take a break and do things for me without the threat of college application deadlines looming. And one of those things is sharing more on this blog and on Bok Choy and Broccoli.

See you soon!