Anna Lawrence is seventeen. She lives in a fictional Massachusetts town that looks a lot like the one I grew up in, haunted by a string of student suicides. She writes an anonymous blog, exchanges long emails with a stranger and wonders if her estranged older brother will ever speak to their parents again. When her childhood friend takes his own life, Anna’s secret posts split her community open wide. But my novel isn’t really about the suicides. It’s about how Anna tries to keep living afterward. How she uses language to create meaning where none seems to exist.

I started writing “The Fog Is Rising” my junior year at Stanford. By then, I had changed my major, found my footing and began to speak in my own voice again. But the novel had been forming long before that — in the hallways of my own high school, in my notes app entries made after freshman year parties, in the strangeness I hadn’t known how to name.

The first 10,000 words came out quickly my junior fall, in a Stanford class adapted from NaNoWriMo. A few months later, I applied for and received Stanford’s Major Grant, and I used it to write through the summer and to study creative writing abroad at Oxford. It was, by all accounts, a dream. But what I remember most vividly from that time is not bliss — it’s urgency. I had to write this story. I had to make something legible out of the feelings that had followed me to college: guilt, ambition, pressure, shame.

Anna doesn’t attend Stanford. But if she did, she would have known exactly what to say after Katie Meyer tragically died in March 2022. Nothing. Because at my public high school, in the world I grew up in, we had already learned that kind of silence. We made jokes about sleep deprivation, about self-harm, about Adderall. We competed over test scores, then cried alone when we failed. And when a student died in our school district, we said it was tragic, and we kept going. What else could we do?

Coming to Stanford felt like a clean break. A chance to begin again in a community filled with brilliance, empowered by the opportunities only the best university in the world could afford. No one knew me here — I thought, finally, I could stop proving myself, stop staring down each day like it was the barrel of a gun. But of course, I couldn’t. Not yet.

My freshman winter — just weeks before Katie Meyer’s death — I found myself sitting in Wilbur Field, phone pressed to my ear, crying to a friend from home. Earlier that day, in conversation with Stanford classmates, I had asked why the stress we carried — so constant, so crushing — was treated as normal for 18-year-olds. Why had we worked so hard before Stanford only to feel the same or worse while here? One of them had shrugged: “Wouldn’t it be like this anywhere?” Meaning: the pain was simply part of the price.

I didn’t want that to be true. I still don’t.

But eventually, something shifted. The architecture of my Stanford life — once skeletal, all scaffolding and performance — began to fill in. I found people who loved life loudly and tenderly, who made space for confessions and laughter, sometimes in the same breath. I joined Chi Omega, where I discovered not just community, but purpose — beautiful, intangible purpose, like the sunlight that peaks above Hoover Tower and warms a campus, a soul. In our little yellow house at 1018 Campus Drive, there was always someone to walk with, someone to cry with, someone to hold me through both the most broken and brightest days. Joanne, Maria, Angelina, Isabelle, Lauren, Allie, Sara and Iliana — you taught me what it means to be loved unconditionally, and to love in return.

I wrote and edited for The Stanford Daily, where I remembered that my words could matter to people I might never meet (like you, dear reader). I worked on Caesura, the undergraduate journal of literature, and served on the Inter-Sorority Council, where I helped shape a recruitment season involving more than 700 students. Each of these spaces reminded me that a life of the mind is never just intellectual — it is embodied, relational, porous. That thinking and feeling, reading and reaching out, are not separate acts, but part of the same continuous gesture toward meaning.

This year, I became an RA in Mirrielees and learned that care is not simply instinct — it’s practice. It’s built in inaugural cake picnics and quiet knock-knock conversations, in hard goodbyes and hopeful returns. In setting up coffee and offering second chances.

There are too many names to name. But to those who lifted me when I faltered, who picked up the phone every time, who walked with me through long nights and even longer questions — you are stitched into the special fabric of this place, and into me. I hope you know how much you’ve meant.

By the time I finished the first draft of my novel, I had been an English and Linguistics double major for over a year, having left the School of Engineering after realizing I did not want to spend the four most precious, intellectual years of my life worrying about concepts I didn’t think about in my free time — at least not in the way I thought about words or stories or people. I was no longer trying to survive Stanford — I was starting to enjoy it. I took classes that made me fall back in love with language, with the girl who had wanted this all so badly in the first place. I wrote essays I actually wanted to write. I stopped being afraid of my own voice.

I wrote again — not just because I had to, but because I could.

By senior year, I was writing my second book at Stanford — this time, a 124-page honors thesis in literature on the fiction of Sally Rooney. I argued that her dialogue, marked by ellipses, omissions and ambiguity, mirrors the conditions of digital communication. That our generation has learned to speak through subtext, to defer meaning, to live inside implication. I called this new phenomenon “dialogic implicature,” and I saw it everywhere: in texts, in emails, in the gaps between what we feel and what we’re willing to admit.

I suppose both my novel and thesis are, at their core, about how young people make meaning under pressure. How we grieve. How we create intimacy despite everything that conspires against it.

I used to think the hard part was getting in. Then I thought it was staying. Now, I think the hardest part is choosing the life you want once you realize you have a choice.

Anna actually doesn’t get into any colleges. Or, she chooses not to go, I haven’t decided yet. But Anna does end her story by leaving town. I’m planning on doing the same, too. I’m excited to build my next chapter — and my new company, a PR agency that helps authors, scholars and thinkers bolster their intellectual platform and get in front of digital audiences — in Los Angeles. I truly can’t resist California’s weather. 

But no matter what becomes of me in my next city, in my next chapter, I know I want to keep writing. I’ll post on my Substack, New Material Girl. Maybe I’ll publish “The Fog is Rising” or another novel entirely. Maybe my thesis will become the basis of a Ph.D. But either way, I want to keep asking what language can do — not just for me, but for the people who need it.

And if I’ve learned anything at Stanford, it’s that stories don’t end when you think they do. Sometimes, they begin again. Sometimes, the fog lifts, and you rise.