Tell us about something that is meaningful to you and why (250).

My answer to one of Stanford’s supplemental essay questions.

I think I might have a tab addiction.

Yup… 417 tabs on my MacBook may be just a little excessive. In spite of my friends’ intervention, I cherish my beautifully cluttered culmination of tabs.

It’s not really my fault though; it’s paradoxical. Every time something intriguing catches my eye, I nonchalantly open another tab — just to be backstabbed by my painfully slow cursor dragging across the screen and waiting seemingly years for links to load. Not to mention the constant feeling my laptop is about to catch on fire.

My friends wonder if I know anything about bookmarks, and I do. But I’m reluctant to part with tabs because they’re a timeline of my recent past, a log of my thought processes, and a collection of disparate eye-opening ideas and evolved my thinking.

My tabs aren’t just hoarded random curiosities. They’re a collection of perspectives that have shaped my present-day character, innovations that are fueling my future, and visuals inspiring my creativity. My tabs are like hundreds of mirrors reflecting the bouncing thoughts in my brain.

One cluster reflects an obsession with Parisa Tabriz and her hacking highness — ethical of course. There was the time my brain exploded trying to fathom the complexities of a crumpled paper ball. TedTalks led me down a rabbit hole as I explored my feminist label.

It is meaningful comfort knowing that all these divergent ideas are accessible facets of me, still alive and well, just waiting to be spurred again.