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With graduation from SDSU looming on the horizon less than six months away, there’s a lot on my mind as to what comes next. In the short term, rejoining the workforce with a shiny new bachelor’s degree in hand and finding a way to pursue a master’s degree. In the long term, an uncertainty that’s been slowly chipped away by introspective rumination on my present and past circumstances. The existential pressures of age started to rear their heads years ago when I decided to return to college at the end of 2019. That “new year, new decade, new me” aspiration was a hopeful attempt at reorienting myself in life, to move on from the addled wreck stuck in past traumas and struggling with depression & anxiety; to rediscover my “true” self. Along the way, what were random single white hairs on the side of my head back then have now become a noticeable salt-and-pepper mix on my scalp and beard. I've already long carried an acute awareness of my biological age and a sense of having to “catch up” to it, most of my peers having earned their college degrees long ago. Seeing it increasingly reflected in the mirror each day only made the distance to the associate’s degree graduation finish line all the more agonizing. Those pressures were further aggravated by the sudden death of my cousin Stephen in 2021 at the age of 43, which I only found out about months after the fact by way of Facebook. Following his passing, a part of Aero Drive was honorarily named after him and his brother Deegan (whom had passed away back in 2013, aged 47) for their service to the City of San Diego, bringing the city its first street sign with Chinese writing. And I was left as the last surviving male heir to my grandfather’s name and bloodline, the mixed Mexican grandson he and my grandmother never wanted. This heavily influenced my decisions to apply to SDSU and subsequently enroll after admission was offered. Cousin Deegan was 20 years older than me, and I only remember seeing him once upon a...