Annette Lin, class of 2025
It's difficult to be optimistic these days. Maybe it's the university application season or the fact that I'm becoming a legal adult soon. Maybe it's knowing I'm nearing the last Alias Magazine issue of my time in high school. In accordance with my sentimental personality, I've been reflecting on what I've done and what lies ahead, and with that reflection comes a familiar pressure: to face the future with boundless ambition, to believe that anything is possible.
Like many students of the times, I have been routinely encouraged with the idea that I have no limits. But let's be honest: "You're limitless" falls flat like words of affirmation from ChatGPT when asked to help you study Spanish vocabulary the night before your test. Today, we feel our inadequacies acutely. We always want to be smarter, reach higher, do better. Every day is a mission for improvement—and it should be, to an extent. Becoming educated is certainly among our responsibilities. But I can't be the only one who frequently feels like I've reached my limit. At the accidental sunrise (courtesy of my time blindness and very confused circadian rhythm), when the calculus isn't calculusing and the English isn't Englishing, limitlessness is unfortunately not among the things I'm feeling.
In so many ways, it's an excuse: "But we didn't even crush your dreams! Why haven't you saved us from ourselves?"
In others, it's our destiny. We are the bearers of the light. Whether we like it or not, the human instinct for self-preservation will drive us to illuminate another day. In the face of terrible odds, we will fight, fall, and flourish. We will live in spite of what we have been given. I'm thinking of D. S. Waldman, who writes of his weariness toward the phrase, “the extraordinary times we are living in.” He puts it perfectly, and I hope my English teachers will forgive me for this long, unaltered quote: the extraordinariness lies not in the times themselves but in how artists respond to them "in ways that inspire and affirm, that breathe life into our collective humanity, or at the very least allow people to feel seen." In this issue of The Alias Magazine, students at AHS do just that.
Join our contributors in pushing the limits of limitlessness: how it liberates, and how it suffocates. "[S]oar high with the birds, carried by the winds of opportunity" in Michelle Ho's exploration of "free skies [and] an endless abyss—or is it a free abyss and endless skies?" Question the stakes with Hazel Wong, who remarks that "the sky was always the limit / until you came along." Celebrate the times when "the music is all you hear and all you can think of" with Katherine Cotta , or aspire to preserve them with Emma Wang, who shows us what it's like to "wonder / How to force a clock hand to stop moving? / How to make one moment last forever?" It's a constant fight, and, frequently, a losing one. "But," Sophia C. declares, "I'm trying. I’m going to test the limits by sending this work, just to see what happens." No matter what life flings our way, we know AHS students will always be challenging themselves. It is just as Faith Harnanto writes: "until all of our pen cartridges are empty, / until all the coffee shops close," we will never stop creating, growing, and molding the world around us.
We are never alone. At the climax of Mean Girls: The Musical, Cady Heron sings “the limit does not exist!” in a math team victory, rejecting the categories forced upon her in the social landscape of North Shore High School. Fortunately, this story is not confined to musical theater. In the 16th century, Galileo's experiments and observations challenged the limits of prevailing Aristotelian and Ptolemaic ideas of the universe, leading to the acceptance of heliocentrism and laying the foundation for modern observational astronomy. Embrace the mindset of Cady and Galileo—you, like them, are human, and thus you are limitless by association.
We, like them, are human. We're limitless.
limitless thanks to this issue's contributors for keeping creativity alive at AHS, and to Ms. Zaidi for her stalwart support of the magazine and The Writer's Den.