Just getting home from work, I swing open the door and step into my own corner of the 5-bedroom house I'm co-renting.
Click. A flood of artificial light.
In front of me is my bed. The fitted sheet is coming off the corners. It never seems to stay on. Underneath, a pink stain marks an old misadventure with drinking Gatorade in bed. Miscellaneous textiles -- a jacket, a button-down shirt, and a towel -- are heaped towards one end.
The rest of my clothes are piled on the floor.
I sigh, put on my headphones, pull out my laptop, lie down, and take a look at my work.
Welcome to my life for the past two years.
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I've never lived a particularly organized life. My parents used to try to establish new routines for us every school year, but they'd never last longer than a week or two.
In high school and in college, that free-flowing aspect of life was something I maintained, enjoyed, and appreciated. Each day was different and could change depending on what events happened to be going on around campus. It wasn't that I hated structure, but life felt more exciting when I didn't have everything planned out.
I would still develop some routines: classes, outside activities, and a consistent group of friends to spend time with. Sometimes I would start assignments early, but I usually ended up finishing them shortly before they were due.
Overall, though, I did well in school, enjoyed it, and I found good friends and things do.
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When work started, it was pretty much the same as college life at the beginning. I met new friends at work and joined the a cappella club. I tried going to some social parties for the first time. Working life was harder than college because I lost the close friend group I had before, but things were trending upward. I was more-or-less successfully infiltrating a couple of different friend groups. It would just take time to feel completely at home. Also, I had a friend from college going to Berkeley, which helped give me a sense of grounding in the midst of the new.
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COVID made things a lot worse. But even before COVID, there were aspects of my life that were challenging enough. Maybe I needed to find other things to focus on, but I definitely felt like I was "behind" when it comes to relationships, and I had been actively trying to date (on and off) for a couple of years at least. I thought that being in the Bay Area might help, but things just felt the same. I wasn't worried exactly, but I did want to get a head start against being forever alone.
When I was in Florida, I was more cautious about using dating apps since I didn't really want to be recognized. Eventually I just decided I was being overcautious, but it was still nice to be somewhere "out on my own" where I didn't have to worry as much.
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Dating apps always take up way too much time whenever I use them. I went on a first date with some guy who was a college senior at Stanford (decided it wasn't a good match); a couple of dates with a guy at Google (apparently we had communication issues); one lunch with a guy at Facebook who happened to be on the same team as my roommate; and a few dates with some guy at Berkeley before it became more clear that we had different values -- and then he had the nerve to curse me out when I said I didn't think we should date. I guess it sounds like a decent amount of things going on, but this was over the course of 9 months or so.
In the meantime, I was also kinda low-key crushing on some random people in a cappella -- in addition to joining the Assistant Dialogue team at work and getting housing in Fremont with three random roommates from Facebook I rarely talked to.
So overall my life was okay. I had a cappella on Tuesdays and Thursdays. My work-life balance wasn't too bad. I was still trying to get situated, but I was willing to try things out and learn how to make my life better. (At the time, I was still infatuated with minimalism and trying to keep my expenses low, so I didn't buy a car or try to explore/travel too much).
Victor was _the_ mistake of 2021. Absolutely would not do again.
The upside is that I, uhh, now have more experience making bad mistakes, and hopefully can learn from that.
My life became pretty messy during COVID. I was barely eating to live, and I was working out of compulsion; just trying to get by.
I couldn't really talk to my family and get advice since it's hard to section off aspects of my life when I'm talking about my job or general living standard. Like a lot of people, I was just trying to survive and make the most out of what I was doing. I did do a couple of things for myself, like buy a bike. And I visited home and my sisters. But I was pretty much in survival mode. I tried to cook for myself using HelloFresh. That worked okay. I tried to exercise a little bit and take protein powder. I lost a decent amount of weight, maybe started out at 140 and went down to 120 something (I started comfort eating for a bit and now I'm back up to 145 lbs LOL).
As far as learnings go, I started reading some self-empowerment books at least. One book was written by some woman who divorced her husband and then realized that she needed to create the life that she wanted and not be captive to fear.
I started talking about bravery and optimism/pessimism in Mandarin speeches I wrote for a bilingual Toastmasters club I joined. (I also read a pretty long webnovel in Chinese for the first time.) So I started to think about which skills and goals and activities in life I really do enjoy and care about. In a similar vein, I tried to stop thinking about my life as being incomplete because I'm missing other people in my life to make it interesting. I realized that maybe I'm not as confident as I'd want to be. And maybe I should change some things about myself to be more attractive to other people (e.g. girls), if that's the goal I want to have.
Overall I'm still trying to figure out what I want in life, and how to balance my own wants with the wants of other people.
There's a lot more I could write about the "cult" I ended up involved with (72) and how things with Victor have made me try to think more deeply about what I want in life, but I need to figure out how to organize those thoughts.
In summary, I'm glad that my room is cleaned and maintained now, that I brush my teeth and floss every night, and that I've started to think about areas to keep developing myself. I'm glad that I'm not as affected by the bad experience with Victor now, and it's great that I no longer relate to cringe ideas/songs like "it should have been me." The only thing that's unfortunate is that I _feel_ like my feelings weren't treated like they should have been; the good thing is that that person and situation are no longer in my life! Hopefully I can not have trash judgement in the future and figure out how to live life.
Well, my life is a mess. How about yours?
P.S. One good thing that came out of this post is -- at least I didn't accomplish completely nothing during the past few years. Even during the pandemic I joined toastmasters, before that I tried a cappella and improv club. I traveled to Spain and France and LA and Colorado and Florida. I saw my cousin and sister get married and spent time with siblings. I improved my Chinese. I got better at singing. I learned some things about myself. I tried drawing a little bit and learned to crochet. I went to Top Golf for the first time and met a sugar baby and was invited to her $50k Halloween party. I learned how to cook Mapo Tofu and buy the ingredients from the local Asian store. I completed a course on Coursera. Maybe I would have rather just bummed around with a SO or hang out with friends more than do any of those things, but overall the past couple of years have been OK.
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