Remember that morning when you and Mom went looking for lucky clovers in Century Park? You came across an ocean of matcha green clovers and tried together to search for a four-leaved one. After a while, your neck was starting to hurt from the search, so you said: “I think this large a field of three-leaved clovers is enough.” And Mom nodded: “This much effort is worth the luck.”

Thank you for thinking about that message all day long. Thank you for making it a part of you. Those brain cells made the person writing this letter!

I remember your imposter syndrome period—you tended to actively make yourself SEEM more competent than you actually were. Then you suffer from the anxiety of not living up to those expectations. You attended that book club your literature teacher hosted, and you couldn’t stop talking the entire time. It was a Zoom meeting, and you looked at your own video as you rambled on about books you’ve read before and personal anecdotes. But the thing is, I can’t even remember what you said, it was all more about you than the actual book. It is since the Great Clover Search that you started to shift that gaze onto the efforts you made on everything instead of how they looked or sounded. I flipped open the diary entries that you wrote and saw you copied down, in big bold fonts, Maugham’s words “The world is hard and cruel. We are here none knows why, and we go none knows whither. We must be very humble.”

It’s funny how people change subtly, and it’s only when you look back that you see how far you’ve come. I know that I hosted a recent book club about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and I had the greatest time. We talked about love, memories, and identity. A girl asked what we thought the character’s racial backgrounds were, and that prompted a heated debate that somehow included Trump. I think I talked just as much as in the last book club, except every word was a genuine thought, or a careful response. I wish you could feel that fulfillment of turning on the “gallery view” option in Zoom and not having to worry about how your bangs looked, just immersing yourself in that discussion…

But I don’t have to worry about that—I know you will. At the place where you’re at right now, all you have to think about is the effort you put in every book, every essay, every math problem, and every conversation. That fulfillment will chase you down on its own.