To ask about how I’ve been doing to me from the past

 As I have previously unashamedly written, I was devastated by a lot of things that doesn’t work last year. A friend said, everyone, has their own year. Maybe 2022 was not mine. After a while, however, I started to feel shame. Perhaps because my ratio has taken back over the control room from my feelings. Another exact reason was how I have been exposed to the stories of people’s unbelievable struggles. I am ashamed of thinking of quitting and giving up so easily.

In this short mind-cleansing writing session, I would also like to revisit the powerful question from last year. About who I am, which is like a lifetime question. In one conversation, I remember a friend cited a very beautiful Arabic quote about finding oneself and own life purpose. Something that sounds like the sky would never be clearer once you reach it. My bad for forgetting what it was exactly. The point is that I totally agree. Luckily, I have a little development to my last answer to this sacred question.

Last time, I dared to say that what speaks about me the most is my creative mind. It grew with me, through bad and good days. Sometimes it helped me to cope with sadness, the other day it brought me joy and victory. It is deeply rooted in me so when everything is taken away, I am quite sure it will still be with me.

It was tempting to say that I am a failed person instead of the previously mentioned few good lines at the end of last year. Defeat after defeat, loss after loss, test after test, after all. But one day, before I packed my back to spend a therapeutic end-year break in my parent’s house, I bumped into a lady from the neighborhood I knew since I was in college. We chatted a little in front of my flat. She asked about how I was doing and I told her all very shortly, including the failed plan and the therapeutic break. During the break, I will be doing remote research work and a few field research in Jakarta, I said. Lately, I have told this to quite a lot of people. Their responses were mostly similar. A sympathetic sigh before cheering me to hang on. This lady was different. She said, “It was so nice that you can work from multiple places. On the top of that, you were almost never out of employment.” I was stoned. It came unrealized before. “It must be nice being you. Even though a few things didn’t work out now, they will someday. When it is your time, you will,” she continued.

This time, being grateful does not require a second chance or substitutional rewards, only a tweak of perspective. The chat with the lady made me realize that today, I am everything my college version would ever want. When I first met her, I was a third-year college student who wasn’t sure what to do with her soon-attained history degree. At that time, pursuing higher education abroad was a very distant dream. Doing exactly what I like for a living even though by project and still on the entry-level while not sacrificing financial security was unthinkable. On top of that, I could read, write, and live better while having my everyday work as training to be even better; my room looked like a naturalist’s cottage from a 19th-century European novel and so as my wardrobe; and my dearest people are well and healthy. I don’t know since when I became much more invested in what’s next than savoring what’s happening or romanticizing those that have passed. Is it because, unlike what I believed, I was also being pulled into the exhausting whirlpool of toxic productivity like many others. Unlike what I thought, perhaps I was afraid of being left behind, of missing out?

If I may revise, 2022 which looked so gloomy at its rear was a very long, exhausting, but also rewarding year. Perhaps it gave me the hugest room for development compared to all the previous years. I was recovering from the loss of 12 of my cats in January, only to witness one of my last cats, my dearest one, was severely sick in February. While writing the research proposal for my first Ph.D. application, I had to care for her slow recovery. The strike of guilt if I am not doing anything, weighed with the enormous energy I had to invest to care for a patient never occurred to me before. I am really grateful that this cat is now fully recovered and very healthy. I also managed to survive through a few more new waves of the pandemics and kept working 'outside' though I had to go to the doctor for a swab almost every day for quite some months while, do not forget, commuting for almost 5 hours every day. This working record should still make me proud of my perseverance, shouldn’t it? Speaking about work, I also secured holding quite an important position in event planning and organizing, a competence I used to think as very distant to me. Even better, this connects me with key figures in the field I am currently interested in. I also reconnected with my teachers at my home university and had the chance to help them with many kinds of university works that sort of gave me the teaser of life in academia. This chance also got me to realize that though I wanted a steady job in academia so badly, though there were chances I could pass and really become one by the end of last year, I was still far from sufficiently qualified. I think I just understood what does it takes to work exactly with a lot of people, to teach, to do administrative stuff, and to juggle everything else with research with only 2 hands and 24 hours per day. Now I haven’t been there either, but I got it, at least I got the idea. I would be more ready for the next interview.

Outside work, I can spend a lot of time with my parents. After almost 8 years of living by myself, it felt a bit strange at first. But I was always close with my parents so adaptation did not take too long. Nothing strange yet familiar at the same time as coming back to your childhood home as an adult, but things have been good. I can work here better than I thought. I think sharing a flat with my friend back in my master’s years has taught me a lot. The perks of being at home are the access to my parents’ proper and large kitchen as well as a huge variety of ingredients, so big reunion with my cook persona! For a few months, I was also becoming my sister’s roommate in Jogja. I don’t remember exactly, but I think I ever prayed for a fun roommate a long time ago. Now, my sister, 7 years younger than me is one of my closest people. This is unimaginable when she was half my age twelve years ago, but here we are. We turned out to grow into some shared interests. Though roommate-ing also means lots of cold and open wars, it is still an interesting chapter of my life. Maybe this is the only episode I ever live with someone whose mind is engineered so similar to mine. Flipping between living with my parents and my sister also evolve our relationship. It is increasingly a forum of 4 adults now. The dynamic is kinda shifting but gladly on good terms.

I was not very productive this year. I stupidly let some important events pass by and failed in some that I joined. No awards with big bounty haha. But I managed to write two pieces about my newest interest in a hype popular-scientific online magazine that, to me, looked well accepted. The best part is when people share my writings and how these writings bring new friends, many-many friends with interesting stories. How writing brings friends reminded me of my high school years. It was the time when I fell in love with writing for the first time. I think this was my reason to bring the love to grow with me today too. Besides writing, I also managed to finish two room makeover projects in my parent’s house. Two bedrooms here are now well designed, have curated furniture (some of them were revamped from old and broken stuff) and the whole project is within budget. At the end of the year, perhaps I should also be thanking my crisis, I could go back to drawing and drawing 3 pieces whose end result is quite satisfying.  

In 2022, nothing is aligned within a theme. Everything is very coarse, abrupt, and unpredictable. Between all the hard work, I almost can’t believe that I managed to reconnect closely with my teenage best friends, and we managed to update the friendship into a new contemporary context. I mean, the dynamic persists though we talk about almost entirely different topics. This year, we managed to embark on a few other dream adventures from when we were younger. We had our very first staycation on a high floor of a skyscraper hotel, had dinner in an exotic Yunnanese restaurant, went to a piano concert, and were all dressed up in public. These few fancy milestones however did not turn us into a bunch of strangers who just reconnect to spend money instead of spending time together. Among those fancy day outs, what I enjoyed the most are still the mad conversations. And our dates don’t always have to be fancy, not even sitting around in a circle at a café. We have a few other meetings at my home, cooking together, having sleepovers in the living room, doing silly stuff like karaoke, silly gift exchange, goofy games, and putting on a Netflix movie to be roasted instead of quietly enjoyed. We grew. The teenage club that used to dream about the future has become the harshest critics of adult life. Sometimes we do nothing than cry over our unfavorable fates, but that’s nice. Doing this stuff with these people is nice. I hope this relationship recontextualization stays for decades to come.

All in all, my strong suit is perhaps still my creativity, more than my perseverance or wit that I thought were here too. The failed attempts were like washing away my confidence to take the last two. But answering the mega question “who am I” by taking into consideration that I am a multi-dimensional person enables many other colors to enliven my story. As an aspiring professional researcher, I do fail, but I am so much more than that. I am the dreamy version of my past, my parent’s stone-headed firstborn, the mother of my cat children, my sister’s roommate, my professors’ pupil, and a friend of my friend. I am also, after all, a lover and true believer of myself. I don’t know about you, but after seeing this multitude of personalities in me, it is easier to wake up and get up to the mirror every morning being grateful that I was destined to be this person. This story of life is one of a kind for it is crafted this way out of my history. It is braided out of my past prayers.