The past six months have gone by so fast that my brain feels blank — like I never managed to catch anything. It’s been a month since I stopped, and I still haven’t figured out what kind of life I want. I spent some time reading Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, and I really want to check in with myself: Hey, are you okay lately?
The Past Half-Year
Every workday from February to August: out the door past 8 in the morning, cramming onto the bus, cramming onto the subway, then sprinting from the station to the office, and not home again until close to 9 at night. Exhausting. In February and March I’d come home and still have to sort out and soothe things at home — I’m a grown-up now too, and part of my responsibility is to take on my share of Mom’s anxiety and worry. The one thing with a hint of healing was the books I read in the gaps on the subway. Even though I’ve got a goldfish’s memory, in the moment of reading I could feel myself inside the world of the book, escaping reality. Those were some of the rare moments I could come up for air.
One day in May, on the subway home from work, I scrolled past the news that “Little Flying Hero Grandma” from my college years had passed away. The whole school is moving to the new campus in September. The curtain just drops on it all like that. I never would have imagined that the last day of 2021 would be our last day together. There’s some feeling I have for that piece of “land” and the people who lived on it — I find it hard to describe. I only know that when something like this is about to disappear, an inexplicable sadness sets in.
In June there were a few days when I finally walked out of the office while the sky was still light. The pre-typhoon sunsets were one band of pale lilac and one band of pink, the two of them spread out across half the sky. Sometimes when I look up, I realize I’m actually very small, and very fragile. The summer cumulus clouds keep drifting slowly even after dark, a great cluster of them that never seems to scatter. Apart from the constant rainstorms — clothes never quite drying, headache-inducing — I really did love June. Whether it was eating with friends or watching movies and documentaries I loved, all in all it was a month I felt content in.
In July we did a company offsite at the seaside in Huizhou. Going from one city by the ocean to another city by the ocean to see a different ocean and hear different waves. Why am I so obsessed with the sea? I thought about it, and the sea has some kind of magic — no matter how many times I’ve seen the ocean, every time I see it again I’m still pulled in by the openness, the breadth of its embrace. All the bad feelings simply vanish.
A Few Words About Work
The past six months of work hammered home one thing: you can’t put all your eggs in one basket. You don’t achieve any kind of balance that way, and your shock absorption is terrible. Personally speaking, when I spend the better part of every day on a job in exchange for a paycheck, I’m actually losing too much else. When I want to leave, I default to thinking about sunk costs first, even when everyone around me is telling me to run. A lot of the time I realize that once something has become a habit, jumping out of it is hard — and I didn’t see the stab in the back coming.
The essence of a job is that you’ve handed over the right to choose to someone else. In that environment, as the one being selected, you don’t really have any voice. All the so-called meaning doesn’t actually mean anything. We’re just workers at one node of the assembly line.
This Monday I interviewed at a company in the affiliate marketing space — a direction I’d genuinely been wanting to try. They mostly asked about promotion plans and that kind of thing. I felt I answered poorly on that front, and I got cut after the first round. It made me reflect on the way I’ve always worked: learn and imitate someone else’s approach as fast as I can, develop my own logic for it, execute fast, get feedback, then iterate. I don’t have the let-me-build-out-a-plan-first instinct, and I can’t say which approach is actually better. Getting to observe myself from a different angle through this interview was useful.
Lately
My mood lately has been almost too calm — calm to the point that everything feels muted. Cook, eat, sleep, read a bit, watch a bit, occasionally meet up with friends, send in a résumé when I see a job that fits. I’d genuinely love to just keep living like this, but the wallet isn’t on board. Not long ago I went to a movie by myself, and on the way back I noticed the lottery shop near my building had a giant celebratory red banner up: Congratulations to a Lottery Winner — 7.47 Million Yuan First Prize. That’s the closest I’ve ever been to that kind of jackpot. 😬
I really want to wish for my first one million yuan, and then I’ll lie flat. Looks like a distant prospect. One day I was listening to a song I used to love, and I felt myself suddenly snapped back to the very first time I heard it — the mood I was in then, the exact brightness of the lamp, the words I’d written down, the temperature of the air. So then I started leafing through my old journals and found the words of encouragement I’d written to myself. A strange feeling, like past-me had crossed time and space to give present-me a powerful hug. Maybe this is why, despite how scattered I am, I still love writing the most. Words give us our own imagined space — they’re a space, not just a piece of paper, not just a flat plane. A space can hold so much: everything of ours can be placed inside it, good moods and bad emotions alike. It’s as wide as the sea.
Recently Finished Reading
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- Designing Your Life
- Blindness
- Unlocking the Mind
- West with the Night
- A Feminist Guide to Pop Culture
- Flowers for Algernon