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Kaila Morris

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Unpublished Snippets of 2025

Kaila Morris
Jan 5
0 min read

Updated: Jan 23

January: Return to Status Quo

Nearly all of my friends and family have asked me the same question since I returned from my gap semester: How does it feel to be back?

I wrestle to find an adequate response.

Have you ever broken a bone? It is difficult to forget the electric pain that comes with that first unnatural snap of your body. Years later, you may still recall the exact circumstances of your injury. The brain internalizes such things deeply in hopes of preventing us from reliving the pain later on.

The process is different for depression. Instead of that initial break (if there even was an initial break), I remember the dark days that followed, and the thoughts, actions, and emotions that haunted me when my mind felt most broken. For as much as I focus on moving on, the past intrudes my mind daily—hourly—and in the case of my subconscious, constantly.

Our species finds satisfaction in neat endings, and we too often mistake recovery as closure. In truth, survivors do not “move on” so much as “move with.” We learn to live with our memories, our pain, our regrets, and we learn to manage that which once controlled us.

But we never forget. This is the burden of recovery.

February: The Electric Shock

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about boredom.

There was once a study conducted, in which people were brought to an empty room, with no choice but to sit alone with their thoughts or administer electric shocks to their bodies. The majority of participants chose to shock themselves.

There’s humor to this observation—in a sad, sadistic kind of way—but also a fascinating curiosity. What about boredom makes us so uncomfortable, so afraid, that we prefer electrocution? Are we that terrified of our own minds?

If I’m being honest, I think I would choose the shock too.

I avoid boredom to avoid the unpleasantness of spontaneous thinking. To tune out the self-deprecatory echoes that come with it. Boredom turns up the volume on the thoughts I usually keep muted.

Maybe that’s the real discomfort: realizing that silence makes me confront parts of myself I’d rather drown out.

Summer: No Filter

I kicked off summer with a 10-day trip abroad with a close friend from high school.

This woman is like my own personal angel, the witness to my first-ever public sob session in the eleventh grade. She taught me that there's something liberating about releasing your emotions and not giving a damn who sees. So there I was, singing my lungs out in an empty subway station in the dead of night in Tokyo, Japan, stumbling through the lyrics in-between our laughs.

A few months pass and I’m back in the subway station, but this time, it’s thousands of miles away. Another trip, coming to a close. This station is beside the París-Charles de Gaulle airport, which has just cancelled my flight home. I’m rocking a pair of deformed sunglasses from CVS while stress-tears mix with the sweat stains on my t-shirt.

“Living unfiltered” means both sides of the coin. I know that my younger self would be horrified to see me now—the girl who counted tearless spells like a factory counts days without accidents; who advertised her three-digit number in bold, italics, and underlines. But you know what?

This is freedom.

November: The Grass is Greener

I’m back on campus now.

After three and a half years at this institution, standing at the entrance of the business school still gives me some of the awe I felt on my first campus tour. Rarely do I take a moment to let the awe linger, however. The unfortunate part of being on “the other side of the grass” is that time is desensitizing.

Part of my disillusionment, I think, comes from the trend of taking classes just to forget them after the job interview. To pat ourselves on the back for inflating our GPAs enough to pass the resume screening. But these actions are a choice; and every choice has an equal opposite.

I’m challenging myself to take one course each semester that’s totally unrelated to my career. Debating what first contact with aliens might look like in Astrobiology, wrestling with the ethics of euthanasia in Bioethics: these conversations bring me out of my business school bubble, and in doing so, they fundamentally alter my thinking.

Intellectual exploration teaches us the most important lessons, developing ways of thinking that we can’t predict we’ll need. Sometimes the most professionally valuable thing we can do is stop thinking professionally for a semester and just learn for the sake of learning.

Outro: Thank You, 2025

Some days, after a few hours nose-deep in my computer, the natural light of the outdoors is blinding. Like—“white spots in my eyes, rush to my head, forget my thoughts for a minute” kind of blinding. I’ll squint and moan like a hungover person subjected to Fireworks-era Katy Perry.

Coming out of a depressive episode feels quite similar, albeit on a larger scale. The white spots are blurs where crystal memories should be. It’s like inheriting a script from an actor who played my life for eighteen months and trying to catch up on the lines. All the emotions that eluded me while the movie was being filmed, are suddenly running overtime.

I’m grateful, though. Grateful to be here. Grateful to feel, no matter what shade those feelings take on. Grateful for every high and low this year brought on.

This past semester, an activist visited my class from the other side of the world. When asked about the motivation behind her female empowerment work, she told us that two of her best friends were married at age twelve. They died in childbirth at thirteen.

I had never seen a room so still. With each passing word, eyes drifted up from screens, laptops clicked shut. And as I listened, I couldn’t help but think of the girl I was at thirteen. A middle-schooler embroiled in playground drama about who-was-playing-with-who in the next game of basketball. What a life, I’ve been privileged to live.

So, yes, I’m grateful... for the simple, staggering fact that I got to grow up.

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