From Your Diary: Yashi Samrendra
Writing is my love language.
While some express affection with physical gifts or acts of service, I write — letters, and poems, and really long text messages to remind the people I love of why I love them. I even use writing to fall more and more in love with myself — a task that isn’t always easy. It hasn’t always been like this though. Growing up, I wasn’t very good at writing, and I labeled myself as someone that was very clearly STEM-oriented. Since I was raised in a South Asian household, neither of my parents really had a problem with this. In fact, it wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I truly started to pursue writing. My first taste of this newfound love came in the form of journalism. I was always slightly interested in politics, but it was when I became a political writer for Affinity Magazine that I decided to dive in, head-first, into using art for the sake of activism. To me, there was, and still is, a beauty to journalism. This power, of being able to evoke emotion out of truth, the ability to make your reader feel something by simply stating facts. I loved it; and I dedicated myself to it.
However, as I came into college, I found it difficult to maintain my love for writing while handling my coursework. All of a sudden, I was juggling writing my poetry (which at the time was purely therapeutic), researching articles for Affinity, and being a double major at UC Berkeley, and it wasn’t easy. I started to write less, which resulted in me resenting my majors. It was as if science had stripped my passions away from me. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was humanities-oriented but stuck in STEM — self-inflicted torture if you will. I started to turn more and more to poetry for the sake of my mental health. The extremely outspoken and confident little Indian girl inside of me knew exactly what she wanted to talk about. Putting pen to paper, and my emotions into words is still, to this date, the most natural thing I have ever done. As I entered quarantine, I started publishing my poetry on social media and the response was amazing. I didn’t realize how many individuals were facing the same daily battles until I started getting messages and comments about how my work was powerful and relatable at its core. That’s when I realized that poetry could evoke truth out of emotion the way journalism evokes emotion out of truth. I fell in love with writing all over again and this time I knew that I could do it regardless of what I’m studying or the career I’m pursuing.
It took me a very long time to realize that I was approaching my entire identity incorrectly. Since my childhood I had boxed myself in; I was either a STEM student or a writer. The reality of the matter is: nothing is black and white, especially not individuals, especially not me. I am a writer, I am an artist, I am also someone that genuinely loves studying biology and economics. While I am still unsure of where I want to take this, I am confident that my writing is capable of shaping my own experience as well as those of others.
All I can say for sure is that I want to keep writing, to keep discovering new elements of my identity, and never be reduced to a singularity.
- Yashi Samrendra
