During my second year of undergrad, I was still on a path mapped out by my idealistic 12-year-old self who wanted an engineering degree to create something breathtaking. I’m embarrassed by how I didn’t see the irony.

I was on all fours, struggling to crawl up a hill of broken terracotta shards waiting to be filled by olive oil that’d spilled and dried years ago.

After reaching the brink of almost failing another quarter, I was forced to confront my mental health: my head no longer had the energy to calculate simple kinematic equations, it was already too busy balancing alternative forms of control.

The only way to make sense of the mess was by regaining control over what I’d forced myself to lose the year before: my love for writing.

Writing had become like eating for me – I needed it but couldn’t justify fulfilling my needs, so I made a conscious effort to get rid of it.

I reached Rome as a wandering Etruscan, to attend a Creative Writing banquet that I hoped would help me celebrate my transition into the afterlife, something that was often depicted on the walls of Etruscan tombs.

I entered Villa Giulia to find a Nenfro Horseman riding towards me on his sea monster, representing the journey of the deceased to their afterlife. As I read about Vulci funerary art, I couldn’t help but think how I too had ridden on the backs of my sea monsters and entered an alternate universe.

One where my self-deprecation wasn’t as severe, but the lack of control I had over my senses filled me with fear – I couldn’t tell if I was alive. In Keats words, I had “a habitual feeling of my real life having past,” and I was now leading a “posthumous existence”.

I had managed to eradicate and bury different parts of myself – which had worked out alright for a while – but now my monsters had left me stranded on an island of numbing foam and I needed to excavate my writing tools to survive Rome.

To be continued...