2024-05-23

2024-05-23 | 07:54:12 PM

Hi there! Things have kinda slowed down now. I managed to do a lot of things today, and also got to eat healthy! ¹ Anyway, as I said, things have been kinda slowing down. I’ve gotten out of the ‘reflective’ mood that I’d been in over the past few days as I began writing on my journal. One thing I’ve been really thinking about is the fact that I’m not really setting up a schedule for myself to follow. It’s kinda like I’m just ‘going with the flow’, if you will, and that’s something that had been constantly touching my mind. It’s nice that I get to reflect on stuff like this. It’s a reminder of who I truly am. I tend to enjoy moments when I just slow down, try to be as present with my emotions as possible, and acknowledge all the things that are going on. Oh, and also — it’s been a while since I last touched my private journal. Which kinda tells me something — recently I haven’t been needing much space for my ‘personal’ thoughts.

It’s going to be exciting next week as I would be presenting my Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) talk to my colleagues at Hatch. Oh, and this week’s been okay, too, I suppose, as I’d been getting increasingly more excited to work because of the diversity of clients that Hatch has been getting. Right now I’m working with a brand that I’m super excited to contribute to, and it feels really good. Sure, there have been a few things here and there that could’ve been better; my emotional health, mental health, and a few personal matters could’ve gone better, but I would say this week would still fall under the category of what I would call a “good” week. Right around a 6/10, I would say. Not the best, not the worst, but overall above average. 🤣

As promised, I’d try to write about the stuff that have happened over the past few days, particularly the one yesterday:

Hey there. Not much to write today, just reflecting and feeling my emotions outside my journal. I’ll provide more context in my future entries. Things have been a little bit hectic lately — lots of things to manage both in my academic, professional, and personal life. I’ll write here once things kinda settle down. My dev log’s most likely not gonna have any content too, unfotunately, but I’ll still make the note just so it has a valid excuse. See ya!

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Here I state that stuff have been “a little bit hectic lately”, and that there are tons of things happening in my academic, professional, and personal life. Much of that is because I’ve been feeling a lot of emotions on various things. Most importantly, however, I think the most important concern I have is how I feel about the recent Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia. No matter how hard it is to say, I suppose the truth is that I’m envious about those within that list. In a way, a stupid part of me believes I could be part of that list, too. And no, I don’t have any startup of any sort, I don’t have an impressive portfolio, and I haven’t won a Pulitzer Price of any kind. The best possible award I could possibly have gotten would be way back in Junior High School (JHS) when I’d graduated rank 1.5 in our school’s Arts program. ²

I truly do not know where I’m supposed to go with this without outlining lots and lots of personal information, but the best I can describe the point I’m trying to make is this:

QUOTE

I feel like I could’ve been way more.

And that’s it. And I understand that there are lots of pressures in my age — I’m just 22 as of writing — and the pressure of seeing everyone get all these achievements and awards and all makes me crumble. In a sense, I feel kinda insecure about my achievements. Trust me, I do recognize that I’m not supposed to compare myself with other people. That’s a rule from Jordan Peterson’s book, 12 Rules for Life ³ and I have been largely trying to follow it since. Theodore Roosevelt also famously said the line, “Comparison is the thief of joy,” and I agree. Here’s what Epicurus has to say, as Ryan Holiday says on this video:

A quote from Epicurus, quoted by Seneca

Enough will never be enough for the person to whom enough is too little.

And trust me, I believe all these things. I believe them by heart. By practice, perhaps I do, but there have been times recently that I’d felt “too little”, in a way, just because I see the achievements of other people. At times (and this is a painful little tangent, for which I wouldn’t apologize) I question myself — am I even really interested in the things I’m doing now, or is it some measure I had learned to take to accommodate the nuances of how I think people would want to perceive me? Am I really interested in coding, building something, in writing, and doing all the things I suppose to be heavily interested in, or am I just fulfilling a template given to me by other people?

This part of this journal entry might seem ramble-y but my point remains the same: I continue to doubt that the person I am now is the person I could’ve been, had I had a better set of cards, if we may.

I suppose the context of this journal entry is heavily predicated on a lot of stuff in my past that I couldn’t change anymore. Sadly, I don’t think I’m comfortable enough to write about them here, as most of the information in my childhood are private and sensitive. I guess the closest I can add as a reference is a note from my idea dump:

the difficulty of dealing with trauma

Case Study #1

In this case study, I wrote about the difficulty of dealing with trauma:

• A cloud from my past.

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“It hurt thinking about the things I’d done,” I wrote.

What’s crazy is just how much of what I’d done could’ve been avoided, had I only known better.

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In a way, I’d already forgiven myself. But just because I already did doesn’t mean I’m okay with who I am now. As I see it, it’s alright to not like myself at the moment because I’d done some stupid shit then — just like how every other person has the right to do just that, and not forgive me at all. It’st just that, in my case, despite having already accepted the things I’d done, I still find it extremely hard to make peace with the version of myself today.

And I acknowledge that there are lots of nuances to this:

• How was my environment then?
• What were the contributing factors that affected the formation of my so-called identity?
• How did the events in my past affect my growth from being a child, to being a teen, to being and adult?
• Were I able to build myself and properly contextualize the world without any harmful bias?
• …and many more!

It sucks, and I probably couldn’t analyze every damn thing that had happened to me, but one thing I know is that I carry a lot more burden compared to the usual person. ⁴That makes me, in some sense, abnormal — and I accept that. Or perhaps it make me more normal? After all, we all have our own shit to deal with:

And so the best thing we could do is to deal with our own shit on our own, rather than shove the context of our trauma onto other people’s throats. And that’s the sad part. I’m sure if you’re reading this (someone who mystically found my public journal) and you have trauma, you would feel the same. Like you’re behind other people just because you carry a heavier load.

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It’s almost as if it’s a privilege to not have any trauma at all. The School of Life might disagree with this. The organization (or at least the book) might argue that we all grow up to be damaged, in some way, and it is inevitable for us to grow up with a bunch of peculiarities that we wouldn’t have been able to address, unless with the help of a ‘perfect’ (though we’re all aware that such is non-existent) upbringing. In the book, something as little as an infant being intimidated in a room full of adults can contribute to something significant in the life of the infant, once they grow up, and that’s the unfortunate quality of our little childhood stories — or so I have understood. Here’s a fun little paragraph from the book:

To any grown-up, it is immediately obvious that a three-year-old having a tantrum in a hotel restaurant is irritating, theatrical and bad-mannered. But that is chiefly because we lack the encouragement or empathetic energy to try to recreate the strange inner world of a small person in which she might feel monumentally tired and bewildered, fearful that an unfamiliar dish was going to be forced on her, or lonely and humiliated by being the smallest person in a large and lugubrious dining room, far away from Lanky, the stuffed rabbit left by mistake on the floor in the room upstairs.

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Here’s another particularly striking quote from the book:

We write dense books on the role of government bonds in the Napoleonic Wars or publish extensively on Chaucer’s influence on the mid-nineteenth-century Japanese novel. We secure degrees from institutes of advanced study or positions on editorial boards of scientific journals. Our minds are crammed with arcane data. We can wittily inform a dining table of guests who wrote the Enchiridion(Epictetus) or describe the life and times of Dōgen(the founder of Zen Buddhism). But we don’t remember very much at all about how life was long ago, back in the old house, when our father left, our mother stopped smiling and our trust broke in pieces.

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Circling back to Forbes 30 Under 30, I suppose it probably would’ve already been enough that I gave a mishmash of contexts through which you can assume the overarching theme of this journal entry — that I feel burdened by my past, and in a way I blame the events that had happened in my life (most of which, surprisingly enough, aren’t actually my fault) that contributed to the holistic nature of who I am today. As I have quoted in the earlier part of this note — I feel like I could’ve been more.

• I feel like I could’ve been more, had I not had the trauma that I have.
• I feel like I could’ve been more, had I experienced a different environment when I was young.
• I feel like I could’ve been more, had I not resorted to finding “survival” methods as an otherwise innocent child, trying to navigate the cruel world — I feel like I could’ve been more, had I not “fought to survive” and instead “allowed to thrive.”

And there’s a bunch more that I could write about this. There’s a lot more things I could explore, events I could examine, contexts I could philosophize, ideas I could skit around, and whatnot. But I suppose what I mean to say is this:

QUOTE

I’m not yet satisfied with who I am today.

And I think that’s fine. After all, we all have our standards, and I happen to hold myself to a personal standard that is hard to explain to other people, unless I could magically give people the ability to contextualize the world in the way that I do.

Footnotes

Footnotes

1. My choice of ‘healthy’ is high-protein & fiber, low-carb. I’d followed this type of diet before, when I was still very much active in the gym. I lost 15 kg in 3 months then, which felt really nice. My goal is to go back to normal weight this year, and to heavily focus on my health. I need to stray away from every possible thing that could make my health worse. I have a choice, and I’m choosing to be healthy. ↩

2. The details of my being rank 1.5 wasn’t explained much, other than that I had tied with someone who had her marks close to mine. I didn’t bother to argue or want to get higher marks on any of my subjects anymore anyway since all I had wanted at the time was to… actually, I think this thing would better be put in my private journal haha so I won’t write anything here anymore. I’ll just keep it to myself this time. ↩

3. I agree with some of Peterson’s ideas, and I admit that he has been a large influence in the way I thought about things. However, I couldn’t help but question some of his ideas at present, which could be an entire note and context in and of itself. Further, I’m actively exploring other schools of thought to widen my knowledge, and I don’t consider myself to be a solid follower of any other belief system outside of the Philosophies that I put in this website’s read-me-first page. ↩

4. The word “usual” in this context is defined as in the ideal way that a person could be brought up, possibly in accordance with some (or most) of the items I had listed prior to writing the paragraph within which the word resides (i.e. In an extremely healthy environment that is conducive to proper growth and development; positively affected and contributed to my growth as an individual, etc. etc.). ↩