So.. the big news from the past month was that my whole team has been made redundant. In the grand scheme of things, it’s just one of the numerous Big Tech layoffs in the past few years, and not wholly unanticipated. Also, I’d been telling everyone I wanted to ‘move on’ from this current job anyway, so getting paid to do so is actually not a bad deal. Yet the initial effect was still destabilising and rather unpleasant. Like having the rug pulled under me - even if I wanted it removed, I was still standing on it!
It couldn’t have helped that it happened during a holiday in Bali, in a relatively remote yoga retreat centre, which surely was an odd environment (albeit not necessarily a bad one) to receive this news. What I haven’t told anyone was that the night before I had seen a shooting star and wished for ‘courage’. Whether this is the universe’s way to grant me that wish still remain to be seen.
In any case, I’ve been trying to not rush into applying for new jobs, since I actually have some cushion. For the first time in my life my right to live is not dependent on my continued employment/enrolment. Financially, I am okay for at least months (if not years). Learning to actually take advantage of the security I’ve created for myself is a challenge. Despite the material reality of safety, my emotional instinct is still of lack: that I need to find employment and earn as much money as possible.
Part of it is generational trauma: the survival techniques that my grandma developed, having to survive as an immigrant while raising six kids on her own, was transmitted as family virtues. But also: I am a first generation immigrant myself, my whole life since I was a teenager has been in an environment where my existence is conditional on my performance.
With some help from my therapist I am now constantly reminding myself that I have safety, I can afford to be courageous. Where that energy should be directed to remains to be seen, though.
I’ve been organising my life a little bit using the GTD method (I’ve been put off reading that since the start of my career due to the corporate tone of the book, but it’s actually just corporate Konmari which is kinda cute). My list of projects makes it painfully obvious that all my ambitions can’t be fulfilled at once and I have to be realistic and actually choose some things to focus on right now and put others as “someday/maybe”. I have toa accept that I will not be taking yoga seriously or writing a memoir anytime soon. Having priorities never come naturally to me, I always want to do everything everywhere all at once. And it always leads to a paralysing overwhelm. I’m hoping sticking with this method will bring some clarity on what my priorities actually are.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue on and see what emerges in the next weeks.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.- Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
P.S.
As I wrote this, I realised the hardest thing about blogging (or just journaling in general) is the editing. Not the formal process of reviewing after the text has been written, but the deliberation while writing about what to actually put to words. What to communicate. Maybe my lack of eloquence is to blame. But it’s also about content - what do I want to talk about, given both the infinity of my experiences and the mundanity of it? Perhaps thereby lies the art of it all, choosing what and how to write, in one go.
P.P.S.
Just for the record, some things I’ve been doing since the news that I could go on in detail
- Consolidated the Discord servers for playing D&D
- Started a project to create a web app to help plan D&D sessions (weirdly useful to learn how to deploy and use database servers)
- Recorded a new song idea (maybe I’ll share it here at some point)
- Practiced with the band a couple of times and solidified one song
- Walked around Verumalium for a whole afternoon
- Implemented GTD with the Things app
- Started to build a Zettelkasten note library, albeit it’s sparse
- Started running almost every day
- Started going to yoga classes nearby
- Listened to audiobooks while running. I’ve finished Getting Things Done, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Murakami) , and making my way through Against Interpretation and Other Essays (Sontag) and The Lonely City (Laing).
- Practiced the piano (currently learning Chopin’s Waltz in A Minor)
- Bought a new computer monitor
And some things that I have not been doing:
- Anything directly related to figuring out what my next move is.