sacrifice, grudges, and other excuses for living a suboptimal life.

Inspired by some recent conversations with my friends Bhargav and Q about ambition, sacrifice, relationships, and grudges, I’ve decided to revive my blog after a hiatus of more than a year.

This morning, I walked to Tanzie’s in Downtown Berkeley, a Thai brunch spot I’d been meaning to try for weeks. Despite their excellent khanom krok, I found myself blinking back tears on the walk afterward, listening to Radiohead’s Reckoner on loop. Surprisingly, it was not just because I was listening to Radiohead — but because I realised that I had been building a life entirely around my work and calling everything that competed with it a sacrifice.

In J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, a man follows a bird so obsessively that the line between his sense of self and his sense of purpose, watching the bird, begins to blur. He goes so far as to alter his sense of time in an attempt to appear less human in the peregrine’s eyes, his actions justified by the narrator’s insistence that “the hunter must become the thing he hunts.” Once I replaced the falcon with my own sense of purpose, namely, my desire to become a valuable mathematician, I found it relatable. I found it abhorrent that I related to it at all, because it meant I was consciously choosing a suboptimal life and calling the loss of self a sacrifice.

It’s an open secret that I’m a woman of many vices, largely due to my obsessive temperament. While I have several interests outside mathematics, I tend to have a one-track mind and find it difficult to focus on multiple things during a given phase of my life. Math is usually my main pursuit, though not always what occupies the most space in my head. Over summers, when work becomes more concentrated, it becomes both. In pursuit of greater success, I throw everything else out the window and justify it as sacrifice, often at the expense of my social relationships. Because I’m in the Bay Area this summer, close to where most of my friends are based, and away only from people with whom I had more secure attachments, I assumed I might escape that pattern. I was recently proven wrong.

The sad part is that this life has not been imposed on me. I have chosen it for myself. I spend an absurd amount of time agonising over minor details, trying to present myself in the most thoughtful and optimal way. Before every talk or presentation, and whenever I write something up, I torture myself with self-doubt, as though enough suffering must earn me a proportional reward. Recently, I gave a talk at CT2026 that went fairly well and probably still would have gone fairly well had I not spent ten business days on every word and graphic. I suppose this tendency was foreshadowed when, as a teenager reading Don Quixote, I became fascinated by the protagonist spending four days deciding what to name his horse and eight more choosing his own name.

It comes as little surprise, then, that my primary love language is spending time and mental effort thinking about the people I love. I think about what might inconvenience them, how my intellect might best serve them, how I can engage with their ideas, what thoughtful gifts might show that I appreciate their minds, and how I might solve the problems in their lives. I even fantasise about ways my intellect could help them live better.

Most of this arises from the obvious fact that I suffer from a terribly fragile ego. I have a reductionist tendency to treat myself as the sum of my parts, and to behave as though my intellect is the only part that really counts. Unsurprisingly, this is also the form of affection I value most. My close friends know that the best way to flirt with me is to spar with me intellectually, since disagreeing with me requires engaging with my thoughts and sustaining a long stretch of banter. As I wrote that sentence, I realised that all my good friends are contrarians who love disagreeing with me. Perhaps I’m in some kind of deranged polycule (I really need to stop emulating Bhargav’s vocabulary, in his own words, “this needs to go”).

I am fortunate to have truly amazing friends and to both give and receive an enormous amount of platonic love. However, my preference for cerebral attachment has been far less fruitful in my extremely rare pursuit of romance.

First, there is the problem of making another person compete for my attention with whatever has enchanted me at a given phase of my life, usually math. At first, a new relationship can occupy my mind completely, so much so that I turn into the protagonist from Tyler the Creator’s IGOR. Once the novelty settles, I remain attached, but stop giving it the same deliberate attention, as though affection can be trusted to maintain itself without effort. I owe this partly to my own stupidity and partly to the one-track mind that makes it difficult for me to care deeply about more than one thing at once.

In a recent conversation with my friend Q, who makes wonderful math content online and is very tell-it-like-it-is, they put it plainly. To math people, loving a partner can feel like something they do despite their love of math, and forgetting them for a day or more while absorbed in a problem does not register as intentional neglect. I suppose that if my partner is willing to accept this, it should be a two-way street. I should not interpret their occasional unwillingness to follow my trains of thought as disinterest in me. Unfortunately, when someone I care about does not take my ideas as seriously as I want them to, I find it difficult not to lose interest in them, and often begin to resent them instead.

Despite being someone who laughs at all kinds of politically incorrect jokes and occasionally does stand-up comedy, I cannot fully take a joke directed at my intellect as just a joke. Some part of my brain registers it, makes a mental note, and decides to retaliate with a snide remark of my own. God forbid someone tells me I cannot do something. I will move heaven and earth to prove them wrong.

But why am I so frustrated at this? This is truly not in character for someone as unserious and jovial as me. Is all I am my intellect? The idea of that is quite disturbing to me. I remember dates and moments with unusual precision, but usually because each period of my life is indexed by a particular train of thought. To reconstruct what happened on a certain day, I first reconstruct what I was thinking about. My memories of people are often filed inside memories of ideas. This does not mean the people mattered less, but rather that sometimes the thought is simply how I find my way back to them.

Perhaps I wish moments of softness were more salient to me than intellectual conversations. My friend Bhargav recently asked whether I would be content living in the middle of nowhere, with unlimited funds to do category theory, the freedom to travel to conferences, and a house of my own, but little social life beyond conference travel. The idea was not especially jarring, since conferences would still give me some nontrivial access to intellectual conversation. Still, I know I would not be happiest there. I would go crazy if serious intellectual conversation were all I had. Some part of me wonders whether “going crazy” this way would be a fair price for the productivity that reclusion and single-minded focus might afford me. If a Faustian bargain guaranteed that reclusion would make me a better mathematician, I hate that I would need time to answer, and might hesitantly accept.

I feel my writing thus far has painted me as someone fiercely proud of her intellect. In truth, I am my harshest critic and have never known how to extend myself much grace. Perhaps that is why I need someone who will engage unconditionally with my ideas and absurd thoughts, since I cannot always trust myself enough to do so. I become deeply hateful toward myself at the slightest suspicion that I may be wrong, or that I may fail to achieve something I truly want. Scratch that. For all this talk of wanting to be great, I am most hateful toward myself when I get exactly what I want.

I recall an incident in late May, on the day of the math department’s award ceremony. We are told in advance which awards we have received, so there was nothing to be anxious or excited about. Still, after spending most of May repeatedly convincing myself that I had solved a problem in the second part of Double Categorical Approaches to AQFT, only to change my approach each week, I had a panic attack before the ceremony. I felt I had no place at Caltech, much less having someone pay for my education, and did not deserve the accolades, money, or opportunities I had received. At the ceremony, however, people saw only the person whose name was called most often, who awkwardly hesitated to go onstage, and whom the grad students teased for having so many photos taken.

I spent the next day crying and barely able to get out of bed, convinced that I could no longer do math and had simply “gotten lucky” for the past year. It is easy to dismiss this by telling me not to take myself so seriously as an undergrad, but when you are emotionally attached to your work, it is still your work.

I broke down in front of a friend and told him that I felt I had accomplished nothing all year. He was frustrated rather than willing to argue with me, because I had spent the previous day winning award after award and, in his eyes, seemed undeniable. But I had larger goals in sight and felt nowhere near them. Worse, I felt he did not want to engage with my thoughts or prove me wrong, which, as I said earlier, is often the greatest form of love one can show me.

I was so heartbroken by his response that I ate an entire pint of Bacio di Latte’s strawberry shortcake ice cream, cried some more, and then returned to work. That week, I channeled the feeling of being misunderstood to finally fix the problem with the domain double category.

In any case, unlike most of my blog posts, this one has no neat conclusion or point I am trying to make. It is mostly an inventory of problems I have noticed in myself. I am still thinking through them and deciding what kind of person I want to become. My first priority is not burning out, though that remains unlikely for now. Despite the tone of this post, I have still been hiking, watching new films, having good conversations, trying new restaurants, and exploring the Bay. Since CT, my work-life balance has improved considerably.

The harder question is what to do with my personal relationships. I do not want to become less ambitious, nor do I want to pretend that my work will ever occupy an ordinary amount of space in my life. But I need to stop treating every demand on my attention as an obstacle and every loss as proof of commitment. At some point, sacrifice stops being noble and becomes an excuse for refusing to build a fuller life. I suspect I’ve crossed that point more often than I’d like to admit.