The Past Six Months
Time moves so fast — another half-year is already gone. This half-year I’ve been working in earnest. After turning 25 last November, I went on a solo trip to Xiamen, and when I came back I started job hunting and went back to work. By total accident I ended up landing a role in a direction I’d actually wanted to dabble in, and have been slowly making the career pivot. It’s a little busy and a little tiring. There’s a lot to learn, and I’m always the one having to face it alone.
In February I finally went back home for Lunar New Year. Since arriving in Shenzhen in 2023, it was my first time going back for the holiday. Everything had shifted. For every person who used to be familiar, I couldn’t find the version of myself I used to be in front of them. I wouldn’t quite call it distant, but something had quietly changed. I also couldn’t find where I belonged. Wherever I go, I’m just drifting.
What happened in March was disgusting, but it served as a warning to me — start working for yourself as early as you can. Having a job is eating sh*t every day while being forced to ruminate on how disgusting it all is, until you end up angry and resentful. Sometimes I don’t know what it is I’m hating. Maybe it’s the system, the era, that has so many people struggling and shedding their best qualities along the way — resilience, trust.
In April a friend I’d made at work in Shenzhen was moving to Shanghai, and we caught a movie and a meal together before she left. In May another friend was leaving Shenzhen for Huizhou. This year has somehow felt like graduation season — saying goodbye to a lot of people. And once again I’m standing at the road where the flame trees bloom. I happened to get another job offer, in a direction I’d been wanting to try for a while, and I bolted from the March mess at high speed. I don’t know why, but I have this feeling: keep walking forward, and slowly you’ll get hold of the things you once wanted. Fate has its own way of making you whole.
I don’t know what the future holds. Just that sometimes I feel very far away from everyone. Human interaction is starting to feel more like value exchange.
Knowing Myself a Little Better
What do you want to become?
Several times I’ve picked up my Life Journal, opened it on the desk, picked up the pen, ready to answer this question — and every time I can’t bring the pen down. The question of what kind of person I want to become, of what I want — I still don’t have an answer for it. Life requires you to make so many choices, and every time, I’m praying that someone just gives me one option, so I won’t have to choose, because I get so tangled up over it. In 2024 I started seeing a therapist, and one thing she said was that I abandon or forget my own feelings very easily, very often.
Am I a little better than I used to be? I don’t know. Reading books, watching films — all of it is in service of knowing myself a little better, noticing what I actually feel, letting go of expectations of other people. I trust myself more now, trust in the power of effort. I’ll keep trying, slowly, and hopefully one day I’ll be able to answer the question.
Learning Has No Endpoint
This is the most pronounced feeling of the year — there’s just so much to learn, and it changes incredibly fast. The API I bought last year, I’d been using through Claude Code to make tools for friends, and recently I broke down and paid for the membership to build myself an Obsidian-managed knowledge base for quickly learning a new field.
The other thing I have to put on the agenda is spoken English. Because of work I’m in intro meetings with foreigners every so often, and my mangled English level is obviously dragging me down. But studying is dry and hard to stick with — except lately I’ve been hooked on Person of Interest. After Carter was killed off, I never wanted to open it again. I prefer the original team.
The small joys of life have shrunk. It’s mostly the dry, repetitive day-after-day. I leave home at roughly the same time every day, and the people I cross paths with on the way to work are fixed too. The same road, the same people walking toward me, coordinates I can use to calculate whether I left earlier or later than usual today.
A note at the end:
It’s been a long time since I tapped out anything like this. I feel like I’ve gone numb, and I’m trying to wake some kind of feeling and put it on the page — but I sat here for ages and got out maybe a thousand characters. There’s actually plenty I could write and share, but I’m the kind of person who can’t even be honest in a journal — I hide a lot of feelings even there, can’t bring myself to set them down plainly. I’ll admit that openly, and I hope someday I can open hearts and talk about some of the past that hasn’t yet finished being the past.