Matin Firas, Writing Center Tutor Alumni Profile

2/28/25 Interview with UIC Writing Center Tutor ’22 alumni, Matin Firas

• Your pronouns: he/him
• Your major/s/minors at UIC: double major Applied Psychology and Criminology Law & Justice with minor in Biology
• What term did you take 282, with whom, and what years did you work as staff tutor? Fall 2019 with Kim, worked as stuff until end of 2021
• Year of graduation from UIC and undergrad degrees (BA/BS?): BA 2022 Spring
• Year of graduation from graduate school: MA in Counseling Spring 2024 from Northwestern University
• Current job: therapist at Lotus Root Counseling

Where are you and what are you doing these days for work?

I’m still in Illinois; I’m in Evanston right now. I’ve been moving around in Chicago, Evanston, Chicago again, and now Evanston again. In the past three years, I took a Master’s degree in Counseling, and [since July] I’ve been working as a therapist at Lotus Root Counseling, which is an online private practice that takes on mostly Asian-American clients or Asian immigrants.

Where did you do your Master’s degree?

I went to Northwestern, so that’s why I lived in Evanston to get close to the school. And it’s such a beautiful campus. It’s near the lake, and you can see so much of Chicago from far away.

Was this an in-person or an online Master’s degree?

Thankfully, it was in person. I think two COVIDs before that, it was online, but we had practicum, so we were able to see our clients in person as well for some time. That was nice.

How did you feel about your program? What would you say to someone who’s thinking about pursuing a Master’s in Counseling?

I’ll get the challenges out of the way first, and then all the good stuff.

I think the biggest challenge was that Master’s programs cost a lot because there’s no funding or scholarships, so either you take loans or you really gotta pay it by yourselves or your parents, and that’s kind of the burden that you carry through the program. That’s probably the biggest challenge.

But the Master’s in Counseling itself—it’s such a fun and interesting degree because I’ve never learned like that before. It’s not just taking in information and memorizing it, but when we’re coming to class, we’re being asked these questions again and again about how we ourselves reflect on the materials. You know, we might be talking about family dynamics. And then we’re asked, what about your family? And think about that. So it’s like this academic program/group therapy/coaching, where you’re pushed to self-reflect again and again. There’s a lot of papers that’s, on the one side, academic, and on the other side, just like writing your diary. So it’s really a useful two years for your own personal growth as well as academic pursuits. And the Master’s program is small. We had a small cohort. It’s 30 students, and so we pretty much know each other. We’re always together in class, and that’s an interesting experience compared to undergrad, where it’s [often] 200 students.

And was there within your program an option to specialize in counseling for school settings or counseling for adults? Or was it general counseling?

With my program, we had two specific specifications, the adult track and the child track. And I think for school counseling it would be a different program, and Northwestern doesn’t have it.

I’m on the adult track, and with the child track, you mainly focus on play therapy, so you might take different classes. And we work alongside another program in the same department, which is marriage and family therapy, and they have a different licensure, where we focus on individual clients, and then they have this emphasis on—like, you’re going to be seeing multiple clients at once, and it’s a whole different theory. So sometimes we would meet each other and share how different our program is, or how similar it can be.

And can you tell us about how you got there from undergrad—what was your path? How did you know you wanted to pursue this given that you had studied Applied Psych, but also CLJ and Bio….What helped you figure out where you were going?

Yeah, I think that kind of speaks to the back and forth that I had in my mind in college about where I wanted to go. The reason I took Criminology is I was interested in forensic psychology, but then I realized that that’s more of an interest; my passion lies elsewhere for work.

And I think it really started with a class [I attended] called Crisis Counseling at UIC, and it was one of my absolute favorite classes. We were taught how to do counseling as an undergrad. So that felt ahead of its time, because I thought we would do counseling only later on. I had this feeling in Abnormal Psych of learning all the diagnoses, all the illnesses, but having no tools: like,  Okay, what do we do with this? And [I was] so curious about what to do with it. And the crisis counseling class really taught that for me, and they had an extension of the course where you start running support groups during the pandemic, where you use the skills. So that’s what I did, and it kind of made me fall deeper into this is what I wanted to do. And on top of that, I had the opportunity to be a TA for that class. So that was exciting, seeing other students who are interested in counseling and teaching the techniques to them.

That [was] one of the biggest inspirations, I think.

And another is that I liked to advocate for mental health in undergrad, and Active Minds was a big organization and a new one that was that outlet for me to know more about mental health in college.

That interest led up to me applying to counseling programs and social work programs. And between the two, I just decided counseling largely because it has a more practicum approach, really hands-on, and the social work program has a bit less of that, from what I’ve heard.

I was really interested to hear about the crisis counseling class. There used to be something that the Counseling Center facilitated that I think was called United Peers hotline, and there was a class you could take to work for that hotline. Is this the same thing, or was it something else?

Yeah, that’s the same thing. They changed over time. At first it was a hotline, and then they changed it to support groups. So United Support Network was their final form.

I did a mapping of mental health resources at UIC at one point, and it looked really promising, but they disbanded it. I think the person who ran it left, so they don’t offer that class now, but it sounds so valuable. I’m hopeful that maybe they’ll hire someone again to run it. Was it a class for credit, like the way 282 is, or were you paid to be a counselor the way you are as a staff tutor?

It’s a class for credit, and you don’t get paid when you’re a counselor. The first class is the one that you take, like when I was taking it with you, and then the second class is for practicing itself, so you can still get credit while you’re volunteering as a counselor. Yeah, and I’m sad to hear that it is disbanded. I hope they can hire me. I would love to [revive] that.

It wasn’t entirely clear, but when I interviewed the person at the Counseling Center about it, they said, whoever was running it before left UIC, I think.  Maybe there’s an opening there. Who ran it, when you were there, do you remember?

Yeah, I think it [was] Robert Valentine, Dr Valentine, he’d been working for UIC Counseling Center for a long time. He has a PsyD, and he was leading in that class. And when I left, I think he left too. And at that time, maybe they were still thinking about running the class without him, but I guess that wasn’t feasible, or they couldn’t find a replacement.

The other thing I was going to follow up on is you were talking about something called Active Minds. Can you say a bit more about that?

Yeah, it’s this nonprofit student organization across the U.S. It has a chapter in almost every school. And when I was there, I was lucky to be a part of the founding cohort of Active Minds at UIC. So we tried to get it started and hold some mental health events, and I hope it’s still running now. It’s pretty much a community of people who are interested in the field; even if you’re not, and then you’re just passionate about advocating for mental health, feel free to join. They do fun events, like speakers—we would invite someone who’s an expert on meditation to talk, or on Mental Health Awareness Day, we give out this little candies to people in the library, and then attached to it, there’s a note with a fact about mental illnesses that we thought that people should know.

Sounds really cool. I think I’m going to look into whether that student org is still active. I know several students who would be interested in participating in that.

And then I’m going to ask one more follow up question. I have a friend who’s doing a Master’s in Social work in the Counseling track, and one of the struggles she found at the end of her program was that to finish her degree, she had to complete a practicum, but it was completely on her to find it. And it was like applying for a job, and she sent out applications all over the place and got no response. No one was taking on interns, or they had already contracted with other schools, so she couldn’t get a foot in the door. So she can’t complete her degree, and the school doesn’t facilitate [the practicum placement] in any way. They just kind of say good luck. I wondered, was this an issue at all with yours, or did Northwestern facilitate you finding a practicum?

Yeah, that’s very unfortunate. When I was searching for counseling programs, I tried to find the ones that are CACREP-accredited [Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs], and I think that might help ensure that the program is helping. For my program, they did help. They have a running list of active sites, and it’s important for the school to have good relationships with those sites, and at the time, we did. So like [when receiving the application, the site would say]: oh, Northwestern students, we had those before, and they’ve been doing good! And in that regard, yes, we did have help.

But I think something that we didn’t have help with is— there’s still no certainty. I remember that there are some other schools that provide more certainty, that it’s a more formalized application, where the school  sends in the application for you. But with my program, you still have to send it in by yourself. But thankfully, Northwestern has a good connection to each of the sites, so they would take care to look at our applications.

So it seems like a factor maybe for people to think about in programs is: are you accredited? And even if you are accredited, how well do you nurture relationships with practicum sites so that they will accept students from their program?

Yeah, I would say that’s a really good question to ask in interviews to those programs. Sometimes they would have students present themselves at the interviews to help out with any questions. And that would be the number one question. How helpful is the program in connecting you with sites?

And because, as you say, many people are going into debt for this, and they really do need to get a job and a degree out of it, if it becomes a sticking point that you can’t practically get in a foot in the door with the practicum, that can be a real troublesome piece.

And I think because I was an international student too, it was a particular concern, because out of all the sites that they list out, only maybe one or two are sponsoring international students to work further than one year. So if you’re an international student, this becomes, unfortunately, such a big barrier.

And when you’re doing a practicum, does the site typically pay you? Or are you also carrying a little bit of that financial burden through that period?

So in my program, we had two types of practicum. The first one is directly at Northwestern and the second part is the internship year. And for the first one, we don’t get paid at all. And the second one, the internship year, I didn’t get paid, and most sites wouldn’t pay interns because they think that you just like accruing so much information for your licensure.

But I have heard of one or two sites that do pay, and from what I heard from the interns there, it’s so helpful, because, again, the burden of the financial [is real] and maybe it [even] impacts your self worth, being able to get paid for working at sometimes a very intense job.

I imagine it’s an important thing for diversifying the fields. If practitioners are going to reflect the full range of patients who might want to seek help, that can be a barrier to good representation; if you only take those who can afford to take on tuition and have no income for three years, that’s going to limit who can enter the field quite a bit.

And so I’ll transition to asking you a little bit about Lotus, because I’m really interested in this idea that it’s a therapy practice that particularly serves Asian-Americans and Asians. I know that a well-documented disparity is lack of access to culturally competent mental health care for people in those communities. So I’m curious to know: what is Lotus like, and how does the work they do serve the needs of their client base?

I think that Lotus is probably one of the biggest Asian mental health support clinics in Chicago. Granted, maybe there’s not a lot of them in the beginning. So if someone were to search on Google for “Asian therapist,” then Lotus Root would pop up. And we accept all clients, but I think because of that, we really get a big influx of Asian clients. And a lot of our therapists are bilingual. They speak Mandarin and English; I speak Indonesian and English, although I haven’t had an Indonesian client…but I think that really helps. A lot of the Asian population wants to integrate that, especially there’s so many international students from China, for example, andI feel like their number one go to is Lotus Root, because they can connect without tiring themselves with having to stick with English. They can shift back and forth.

And because it’s a private practice, we have a lot of freedom in the way that we practice. We definitely try to incorporate the Asian identity conversations into everything, and sometimes the comfort of [our clients] seeing an Asian therapist also does its own work—that kind of relaxes them and welcomes them to the space.

But we have all kinds of people who are specialized in different things. There’s a therapist who specializes in EMDR, and then another who [specializes] in ADHD, and [my specialty] is more depth-therapy focused, so psychodynamic and relational. I like to have emphasis on emotions.

How did you come to learn specifically about psychodynamic practice? Was that something that your school offered as an area of focus, or did you train yourself in that through professional development?

One of the pillars for Northwestern was psychodynamic teaching, but I think as we arrived, it’s more integrative than ever. It may be before it was more psychodynamic, but fortunately, we still had one psychodynamic class, and that’s when I really fell in love with the subject. I had never heard of it before. And then this emphasis on the unconscious— I started to seek out opportunities to learn more about this. After the class ended, I had this gap of knowledge of like, wait, I want a part two! So for a brief period, I started a psychodynamic student group for us to just meet together and talk about our clients in a psychodynamic way, or concepts.

My sense is that psychodynamic therapy is something that some schools make available more than others. Am I right in thinking that maybe CBT, DBT, ACT—those kinds of cognitive-behavioral therapies are a little more dominant in the field at the moment in training programs than psychodynamic theory?

Recently, there’s a lot of emphasis on CBT. Especially in America. I think America loves CBT, yeah, and structured therapy, DBT, and I think recently, there’s this pushback.

And I don’t know if I’m biased, because I’m in the psychodynamic field, but there’s a pushback [toward] a relational focus, like: oh, we gotta care about the emotions and the relationship that you’re building with your clients. You know they’re as important.

So I think a lot more people are getting more interested in both. It’s like a swing of the pendulum. Maybe back then it was very heavily emphasized on psychodynamic, and then the behaviorists come along and made it about CBT, and I think the pendulum now is swinging slowly to the middle, which I think is nice, because you get to the strength of both sides.

And then also, there’s a lot of other opportunities outside of school to learn. There’s free seminars. I also entered a fellowship for psychodynamic learning. And that really helps a lot. And I think with psychodynamic [theory], it’s really fun to read the books related to it. It’s one of those things where people can be interested, because, out of all the other theories, it’s something that you read, and then you can directly reflect on yourself: like, is this is how I feel at some point, or, is this how my mind could work? It’s so fascinating.

How long have you been at Lotus? And what’s your title?

Yeah, I’m a prelicensed therapist. That’s my title, but I work pretty much the same way as any staff therapist. I just have a supervisor weekly that I see, and so they’re approving my hours, my cases. I have someone constantly to turn to if I need help.

I joined last year in July. So I’ve been doing it almost a year.

And in terms of the licensing process,what is the significance of having a license or not? Would that enable you to kind of open your own practice—what do you see as the trajectory here?

Yeah, there’s two phases of licensure. The first one is, right after you graduate, you take a test, and then you send the results of the test along with your transcript of your program to the licensure board, and then they give you this LPC title, which is the first step.

And that’s where I’m at, although the licensure board—they can take a very, very long time to return back to you. So it really is like a random chance, if someone can get it within the month, or six months or more.

So I’m unfortunately still waiting for my license to come. But that doesn’t prevent me from working, because I still have my supervisor.

The second phase of licensure is that two years after working seeing clients, I would have to accrue 1000 or so hours of seeing clients and also having supervision, and then that would lead to the full licensure. There is an exam related to that, but after receiving that, I would be able to branch off to do my own separate private practice, if I want to, or supervision wouldn’t be a necessity, although I would always think that it’s important to have a supervisor, no matter how long you are in the field. But you get a lot more freedom about how you want to practice, where you want to practice.

Am I right in thinking that working for an existing practice like Lotus, they deal with the insurance end of things for you? I know for some therapist friends who’ve thought about moving into private practice, that can be a consideration, that there’s a lot of admin with insurance that you have to navigate on your own, with your own practice.

Yeah, Lotus deals with the intake and the insurance. So they can verify the insurance. And I think all the therapist does is scheduling, communicating with the client and seeing them in sessions and making sure all the admin notes are straightforward. Other than that, most of the admin work has someone dedicated in the practice that does that, which is nice, because I think if I eventually move to my own private practice, I would have to deal with that myself, communicating with the insurance.

So what is the most rewarding part of working at Lotus now? And are there any challenges or learning curves you’re discovering?

It’s such a big question, because it is so rewarding to work as a therapist, because you’re building these really intimate relationships with clients, and you get to know them very deeply. You can remind them of the strengths in themselves that they forget. And I think there’s a gift, a privilege in that: seeing those strengths and being the first person, a lot of the time, to hear the things that clients are ashamed about or scared about telling, and then you hear it first, and have the first reaction to accept them.

And it’s not just that. There’s this running quote I forgot from a famous psychologist. He thanks the clients [because] they’re the ones who are paying for your own growth. That’s the more personal side of this work is that you can’t stop but to grow, yourself ,as a person. You’re hearing all these [client] stories, and you’re helping them through lives, but some of their lives might touch your life, and you might get inspired by what they do, and you might get inspired by the words that come out of your mouth because of your client. So it’s very rewarding.

And that’s kind of the ideal relationship, when you notice that your client and yourself are growing, and I get to do this for a living! I think that’s a privilege. Sometimes personal growth and work doesn’t always [happen] in the same space, but it is like that for therapy.

And personally for me too, coming from an Asian background in Indonesia where maybe mental health is not being emphasized, emotions are not being emphasized—it’s like a constant healing journey for me to emphasize that for other Asians. That this is important, and this matters.

How would you characterize the challenges of this work?

I think the challenge is that it can be very personal— their emotions impact your emotions. And then there’s this stance that you have to take whatever emotions that come up with you as not only a clue—they’re also a clue for treatment for the client.

You know, if I feel so tired after listening to this client, or so sad, then, yes, I have to take care of myself. But then there’s this other side of it, where, on top of taking care of myself, now I have to look into the sadness to see, why do I feel this way, and why? Why does the client not feel that way? Am I absorbing more of the sadness than they are?

So I think balancing that is difficult; like, this my emotion that I have to take care of, but also it’s a tool for the growth of the client.

And that varies with the intensity of the client; with more difficult clients, you might feel that more often, it kind of lingers with you after work. And you do worry. I think that’s a big thing.You do worry about your clients outside of work, and you think about them, and it’s not always negative. You see something a movie, and that reminds you of a client. But also it can be a negative affect, where you’re suddenly worried about what the client said last week and you worry about their safety.

That’s like the price of the mission and the work. As it’s very hard to leave it at home (maybe I said home because I work at home!) but I mean leave it completely at work, because likely it’s gonna follow you. You just gotta make sure you make peace with it, but also make time for yourself.

When you say you work from home, are your sessions all online?

Lotus is online only. They started in the pandemic. I think that’s why, and they don’t have a prospect of doing therapu in person yet. So all my sessions are online. This is my therapy [screen] background all of the time.

How do you feel like that mediates the experience?

My internship was in person, and it’s definitely different. It’s been a while now, but there’s so much more information to see from a person when I see them in person—like, how they’re going to enter the room, or what the body language looks like. How do they say goodbye? How are they waiting in the waiting room? But that all gets missed in zoom.

But recently, I sort of think about it like—-you know, when people say that they have five senses, and then you block out one and then the other kind of gets enhanced? So I think that the more that I work in online, I just start to focus more on the facial expressions and the voice, like hyper-focus on those things, because it’s very hard for me to get information from the things that I can from in person.

And I’m quite jealous of some therapist that get to do therapy walks with their clients.

Oh, I’ve never heard of that.

It’s like a nature walk. So as long as the paperwork of the confidentiality is in order, and then you have your licensure, you have supervision, you can take your clients out for a walk in a quiet place where they’re not super in public—you know, maybe it’s an empty park. And then you walk and talk, like in a regular session, but the addition of movement and also them seeing nature, I think it really lowers people’s defenses, and they become more open.

I suppose it also brings a whole other dimension of physicality, like you’re seeing how are they are observing the environment around them? How are they interacting with it? How do they move in their bodies? That’s novel. I don’t think I’ve heard of that.

Yeah, maybe it’s hard to do it in Chicago—you might go outside of the city and have to do more driving and all of that. But in the future, I would like to try it.

How do you feel like your WC tutor experience plays into your current work—are there things that transfer?

I thought about it even before this opportunity for the interview, because I think it is connected. I think first of all is that, at least in the UIC Writing Center, the way that we were taught how to collaborate with the writers was in a similar analogy of how we work as therapists; I think I always use the metaphor of a pilot and a copilot, The writers or clients take the pilot seat. And we take the copilot seat. Like, we won’t leave them alone. But then there’s so much agency—they’re still the one that has the hands on the wheel, [even if[ we might help them navigate. But I think the fundamentals are so similar. So it was a soft transition; I was already used to it.

Even though, I think, before the Writing Center, I thought that tutoring would be such a top-down thing, but with my experience, it wasn’t like that. It was much more collaborative. And like in writing, there’s so much of finding strengths— like, oh my god, you write so well on this part, how about you write more of that? Can you do that on this part? It’s so funny, because that’s the thing that we do in therapy too, is like recognizing the strength that people missed and expanding them.

Another thing is, for me, personally, [my favorite writing sessions] at the Writing Center were when people came in with their resumes and personal statements.  Maybe I told Vainis that I had a preference so if you have anyone like that, please send them to me! Maybe that was a seed of my interest in therapy. It was getting to know about people’s lives and their growth. So if you have a particular attraction to helping people write their personal statements, resumes, CVs, then you might be interested in people’s lives in general, or people’s growth.

There’s this thing called Narrative Therapy in the therapy world, and I can imagine Writing Center tutors might be so interested in that, because you take agency in writing your own stories, instead of having the society write it for you and [determine why] you end up the way you are— you have the time to go back and write it yourself. So that’s a big part of it.

It’s a really interesting idea too that part of the work of therapy is rewriting the received narratives of who you should be and why you are the way you are. It does seem like certain writing projects that people bring have a more personal bent, whether they’re personal statements or personal essays or creative writing, in which they have a lot of ownership of the topic, and it’s expressive of their own interests and style. At least as a teacher, I feel like a lot of the conversation about the writing is also conversation about them, and how they understand an experience they had through the writing and how they’re choosing to narrate it. So that’s really interesting.

And, and I think too maybe this is more a direct connection, something that just came up in my mind was—have you heard about bibliotherapy?

I haven’t heard of bibliotherapy! I’ve had a joking thing with my friends that, oh, we should write book prescriptions for each other. But I don’t know if that’s what this is.

That’s absolutely a thing. It’s using literature as kind of a modality for therapy. I think I’m a big believer that people get inspired everywhere in life—it’s not just that they go to therapy and then the therapist said something, and then that’s it. People get inspired when they watch movies, when they read a book or a poem, they get so moved by it, and then it could change more than a session. So I think bibliotherapy works in that prospect—maybe the literature world can touch them more than regular talk therapy could.

And something that I have done is poetry therapy. It’s kind of like a writing session, but instead of focusing on the grammar, you focus on allowing the client to genuinely express their emotions without judgment to themselves, but also imbue creativity into it and fun-ness. One thing that we do—maybe there’s an existing poem, or an existing song lyrics, and then you ask the client to take different parts that they like and then make their own smaller poetry out of a bigger poetry, and then they get to change it to match their own experience.

Do they do that with you in the session, or is it like homework that they then bring back?

I think it can be both. I like to do it in session with them. I want them to see after they wrote it, when they read it to me, just how that looks—you know, how they feel about it, how they perceive me hearing it.

And sometimes I ask them to hang this on their fridge, because usually this poetry that they made is either touching or it has a positive intent at the end that they didn’t realize. And if you’re into literature and writing, I think there’s such a big place for that. It’s a whole field and training. I haven’t gotten the training, but it’s amazing.

Did you sort of come up with this on your own, or was it something that you practiced at Northwestern, the bibliotherapy or the poetry therapy?

They don’t practice it at Northwestern, but I went to an Expressive Arts conference, and that was my favorite workshop was a six hour poetry therapy workshop,

That’s when I found Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound. He has a way of connecting poetry with emotions or life experiences or wisdom.

What is advice you would give tutors interested in becoming a therapist? Is there anything you wish you could go back and tell yourself earlier that you know now?

I think maybe the biggest thing is to enter therapy yourselves. And if you have a specific interest in a specific therapy, then enter that therapy yourself. You’ll get to see the impact of it on yourself, and then if you’re passionate about it, then you start to imagine how you can give the same impact to others. And I feel like that’s going to solidify your future.

And also, being in therapy, you learn how they do it. When you’re learning from books about therapy or in seminars and classes, it’s always never that practical. I think the most practical thing is either you being the client of a therapist or being the therapist of a client. And before you enter the field, you can only be the client of the therapist. So it’s always nice to do.

And I would have a lot of book recommendations.

One is Schopenhauer’s Porcupines: Intimacy and Its Dilemmas by Deborah Anna Luepnitz

This is a book of case studies, written by [a therapist] who likes to write. The way that she tells the story is like you’re reading a memoir or a fiction book. And you get to really see the changes in how it impacts people’s lives and and then you can check in with yourself as you’re reading this: Is this something that you want to do? Because you’re going to hear the struggles of the therapist too there, or the impacts or the weight that comes with it. So it’s a full picture. And it’s an anthology, so every chapter is a different client.

I’m trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who’s still in undergrad or in the early stages of the interest . . . even movies that touch on therapy. I mean, as therapists, we love to watch Good Will Hunting. And there’s a TV series called Couples Therapy.

It’s like a docudrama, because it’s real people’s sessions, and it’s like you’re in the session. And even though there’s this TV production where, to make it sound interesting, they [edit heavily, but] therapists still like to watch it because they show the important parts.

Do you have tips for tutors about taking care of their mental health through the postgrad transition?

I feel the strain of adjustment in some ways [myself’] in the experience of post-graduation, where in [grad school] you couldn’t avoid but meet another person.

But then, you know, now I’m working [fully] online, so there’s this kind of l sense of you’ve got to put more active effort into being in social spaces and more comfortable, which is hard.

So I think something that’s helped for me is to really locate things that [I’m] passionate about in the form of a class or a club.

And if you already know a lot about the class that you’re attending— for example, if it’s a yoga class, then you’re not going to have to balance learning yoga and also socializing. You can just focus on socializing—all your attention can be there. For me that was Muay Thai, which is Thai kickboxing, and something that I love doing.

When I’m in it, I’m not constantly learning. I don’t have a learning curve, because I’ve already learned a lot. [So] whenever there’s someone new who comes into the class, I can focus my energy on [trying to] socialize and not have to multitask this situation.

And it feels like one added benefit of a class or club is that there’s an existing recurrent in-person structure. So it’s not that high of a bar where you have to reach out individually to a person to see if they want to schedule a time to meet 1:1. You have a standing date as a class, people come and you don’t have to do the work the scheduling of this. You don’t have to be the person who’s taking the risk of initiating and saying, Do you want to meet?

I like that part about the scheduling. Like,you’re committed to the schedule of the club, and if you want to schedule something with your friend in the club, then that could just be the next step down the line. And I find that there’s always maybe 5-10 for whatever club or class that you attend, pocket of downtime—Okay, now it’s not about the class. Now you’re just a bunch of people in the same place.

But it’s less intimidating than, say, going to a party full of strangers and attempting to mingle for three hours. Like for some people that can feel that’s just too out of their comfort zone. You know, I say that as if I’m not one of those people. I am one of those people! But, yeah, I think having a structure and a preexisting common interest helps so much.

So this transitions very nicely into what is really the last question, which is I usually ask—just a life update, what is making you happy these days? What are the things you’re doing to kind of destress from work or find pleasure?

I think I’m the type of person who moves from hobbies to hobbies, and recently, I’m trying to accept that that’s who I am, instead of maybe criticizing myself. Like, Why did you leave that hobby behind? Something that keeps me happy is cooking for others. I hold this, maybe once every three months cooking event where I invite my friends, and I prepare a 4 course meal that maybe comes from my country or a particular theme, and just kind of role play in that realm of, like, Chef, you know, printing out the menu, and, like, hosting, so that’s something that keeps me happy. And that’s fun. And also Muay Thai class, like I mentioned, that’s something that’s weekly, something that I can commit to comfortably.

It sounds ambitious, the printed menu and all of that. What scale of a dinner? How many people are you typically feeding?

I think my maximum is only, like, four. I think beyond four, I don’t know how to portion it. And sometimes I try to have fun with it. Like, last time, the menu was from Middle East. And so I had poetry reading before we started eating about Palestine. So that was fun.