˗ˏˋ ꒰ About ꒱ ˎˊ˗

- About Me -

My name is Krishna, but I go by Krish for short. I’m currently 23 years old and prefer they/them pronouns, but realistically I’ll respond to any pronouns. I have an undergraduate degree in psychology that I completed in December of 2022, and I’m currently working towards an acceptance to an American medical school so that I can become a primary care physician and improve health literacy in underserved populations. I was born in Singapore, but moved to Canada when I was less than a year old. Eventually, I was naturalized as a Canadian citizen. I immigrated to the United States when I was eight years old with the rest of my immediate family due to my father’s job and have lived here ever since. My family filed for our green cards when I was 14 years old, but due to a decades-long backlog based on the applicant's country of origin, we have yet to receive them. One study estimates that certain Indian nationals will have to wait somewhere between 39 and 89 years for a green card if visas continue to be made available at the current rate. When I turned 21, I was kicked off of my family’s green card application and lost my place in line with the rest of my family for permanent residency. Although I have called the midwest United States home for almost two decades, I have suffered and will continue to suffer from immigration status insecurity for the foreseeable future. The term politicians use for someone like me is a "documented dreamer" if you care to learn more about it. Although I prefer not to make my immigration story my defining trait, talking about it is unavoidable because it has served as the backdrop to my entire life.

Because I’m not a citizen or a permanent resident, I’ve always struggled with feeling a sense of belonging, and it’s played a large role in my mental health. Some of my earliest memories consist of my mother drilling into my adolescent mind that I did not truly belong in the United States, that if my father lost his job here we’d all lose our dependent legal status based on his work visa. From a young age, I developed and maintained an insecure attachment style. I felt as if everything I put work into didn’t matter. There were times where I didn’t even know if I had a future anymore. I felt isolated since no one I personally knew had an issue close to this. I didn’t know who to go for a shoulder to cry on and get advice from. Everything I did reminded me of the fact that I was different from my peers. My worth felt like it fell down to my visa status. It felt haunting to know there was a chance of me losing my newfound home for something out of my control. I felt like an unseen outsider in the place I called home.

I live an incredibly particular life surrounded by strange circumstances that has become incredibly exhausting to explain to other people. It is so exhausting explaining to my peers why I can't apply for certain jobs, am ineligible for financial aid, or why I still live with my parents. Over the years I've learned to protect my heart and have become rather reserved. I've spent a lot of years doing my best to blend into a society that just was not built for someone like me. I hope that by sharing my thoughts I am able to work through some of my emotions better and feel a little less alone in this world, and maybe make someone else feel a little less alone.

- About the Blog -

As a post 9/11 zoomer, reading other people’s blogs was integral to my early internet experience. I never had one of my own during this time because I was too young with nothing to really talk about, but I was an active participant in this era by reading them. My main interests at this time were Tamagotchi, Pokemon, and sweet lolita fashion, so blogs consisting of these topics were my favorite to peruse. Around 2012, to my memory, blogs kind of fell out of fashion in lieu of social media apps such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook becoming more popular and I spent most of my time online in these walled gardens instead.

I’d been loosely aware of the independent web scene since 2017 through some sites hosted on Neocities, but at the time I had seen it as a waste of time to take part myself. My past experiences of HTML and CSS consisted of personalizing my Neopets’ petpages, decorating my DeviantArt profile to the extent I could without a core membership, and tweaking my Tumblr blog’s themes to perfection, and I thought that those times were well behind me. These platforms were already seen as “not very cool” by the late 2000s. I was in my late teens trying my best to “fit in” with the rest of my peers who were more interested in social media platforms with minimal customization options. I thought that I needed to focus on using my energy and time online on things that were considered “cool”: maximizing engagement on social media platforms, growing an active audience, and creating side hustles out of all of my hobbies.

Eventually this attitude towards the internet burned me out severely and I slowly started losing interest in all of the things I once loved doing. The internet was synonymous with social media to me. It was like my brain became reprogrammed to see things in how much engagement they would garner online, rather than as a tool to enhance and share what I was already doing. When I was younger, the internet felt less clout focused and more focused on self expression. I wanted to be able to express myself on the internet the way that I felt others did online back when I was a child, even if it wasn’t necessarily the reality back then. I wanted a place on the internet where I could express myself online without feeling like my data was someone else’s and feeling the pressure to prioritize conforming to the platform’s content and posting trends over just publishing the content I want to produce.

This search has led me to creating a personal blog subsite under a subdomain. These days I'm just working on unlearning some of the unhealthy thought patterns I developed growing up to survive. More than anything else, my only hopes for the future are to be happy and healthy. I have quite a few creative outlets where I'm able to express myself and my thoughts: my physical diary, my art, my private twitter account, my personal site, and the Discord servers that I choose to be active in. I see this blog as yet another outlet for myself. I plan on writing this blog as if I were writing to update a friend about my life— expect a relatively casual tone over something professional. I chose to maintain this blog because I find that there's a particular kind of peace and stability which comes from just putting thoughts out into the world without expecting the immediacy of a conversation, but I can be reached at krish@sanguineroyal.com if need be.