Showing all posts in Overcasted Mind

In Life on the Equator, Overcasted Mind, Pandemic Pondering

When does a break become too much break?

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When does a break become too much break?

At the beginning of the pandemic, I had my fair periods of bursting productivity. I completed my step-one fixed step training at work ahead of time, aced my French exam, went to the class twice a week virtually, wrote more than 20 poems for my portfolio website, revamped my childhood bedroom to an adult workspace, started a new obsession with houseplants and even created Excel spreadsheet to document its well-being updates, got myself a piano keyboard and taught myself from zero, regularly read papers and articles about planetary geology, started volunteering again, and the list goes on.

Yet a few months later, here I am, spending all my free time in the last few months either cuddling with my cat or binge-watching some shitty TV shows because I’ve run out of the good ones to watch. There’s no crap left to be given for things other than these two. Work hasn’t felt stimulating in a while either – and I probably haven’t been very receptive to new challenges too recently. I didn’t even have the willingness to spare some time to write here again. I gained some weight because I don’t exercise, I haven’t put my skincare on in months, and I’m only capable of the bare minimum of household tasks in the house, i.e. drying clothes and vacuum-cleaning. I’ve let my parents water my houseplants, a few died, and it’s been a month since the last time I checked on each one of them carefully.

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In Life on the Equator, Overcasted Mind, Pandemic Pondering

Is gratitude a prison?

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Is gratitude a prison?

There was this conversation between Randall, the adopted son of the Pearson family, and Kevin, his non-biological brother in This Is Us S05E13 that had been stuck with me for a while. It’s when Randall admitted that the fact that he was adopted by a family he loves so much makes him feel that he is bound to show nothing but gratitude at all times, while that feeling, truthfully, feels like an emotional prison because oftentimes he still couldn’t help but thinking about all the what-if’s had he been living with his biological parents instead his whole life. And Kevin said he sounds “wildly ungrateful.”

And I’ve been thinking about that ever since. The feeling of having to constantly show gratitude because people might perceive you to live a somewhat ideal life, when the truth is, sometimes you just want to lash out because things haven’t felt okay in a prolonged time, and let the world watch you go nuts in 4K if they please.

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In Life on the Equator, Overcasted Mind

On Impostor Syndrome and My First Work Anniversary (Part I)

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On Impostor Syndrome and My First Work Anniversary (Part I)

It barely feels like a year has passed since I signed with my current employer to officially land my first full-time gig.

With all that had happened in the past year, today I’d like to try to reflect a little bit on this very short amount of time that I have invested in building my career as a geologist. A position that truthfully, I never really knew would fit in or not, that I was never too confident about. Not because I thought I sucked at it, but because I personally never thought that I was exceptionally good at it.

I didn’t graduate cum laude in my undergraduate, unlike many of my classmates. The ability to find an interesting research question in this field does not come quite naturally for me. Any geology-related achievement that I ever made was more of a result of being scared of failure and becoming a disappointment, instead of a purely natural drive out of passion and curiosity. I’m lucky that I seem to still do pretty well in the past eight years which was mostly thanks to my innate perfectionism and commitment, I guess, but truthfully, I just never expected to really succeed in this field.

Maybe at least until a year ago.

(This title will be split into two-piece articles since apparently I had refrained so much from writing about my career, hence I’ve got so many thoughts to be poured now. This first part will mostly talk about my process of finding my entrance into my first full-time job. Buckle up if you decide to follow along, because this post isn’t particularly a short one.)

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In Days in Edmonton, Overcasted Mind, Wanderlogue

Winter Wonderland

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Winter Wonderland

Winter has witnessed me blossoming into a better version of myself, and the opposite. It’s the season where I got to explore new boundaries of what I was capable of feeling. Some of my best days indeed involved a sight of endless pile of white ice, but some of the worst did as well. It has seen some of my loudest laughs and some of my worst cries, and every confusion in between. It brought along some of the days that I’d miss a lot, and some others that I’d rather completely forget.

Winter, for me, was a time of forgiveness. Of independence, of figuring out what truly matters and what does not, of redemption. When there was too much emotion, yet too little space in one’s heart to process.

But it was a beautiful sight. Regardless of seconds, minutes, hours, days, which turned into weeks, which might turn into months, where I was aching; it was nonetheless always a beautiful scenery to remember those times by.

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In Overcasted Mind

Undigested arrays of thoughts that come out as a rambling essay

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Undigested arrays of thoughts that come out as a rambling essay

I know I can’t be the only person who sometimes goes to sleep thinking about a certain mistake, or embarrassing moment, or something utterly nonsense that I somehow managed to pull even out of a seemingly very casual thin air; wishing that by the time I wake up in the morning it’ll all be a distant memory that no longer matters. Except that most of the time, it does not.

The thoughts linger, and when I first open my eyes in the morning, it’s still going to be the first thing that intervenes into my mind. And then I’ll continue to have that battle within myself that won’t see a finish line until a certain situation unfolds and tells me whether or not that mess I created indeed results in something ugly – and if it does yield something bad, how bad it is exactly.

People – at least those on Indonesian Twitter-sphere, it seems, based on my not-so-in-depth popular culture observation – seem to enjoy being in a competition of: “Who overthinks the most?”. I hate to join the bandwagon as I think my particular case is not exactly special and a bunch of you may experience similar torment constantly, but I just wanted to say that these thoughts… Suck. Big time.

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In Overcasted Mind, Pandemic Pondering, Thoughtful Enlightenment

Coexisting with Coronavirus: Making Peace (Again) with Adjusted Expectations

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Coexisting with Coronavirus: Making Peace (Again) with Adjusted Expectations

I find it funny that only last year, after a series of turbulence that eventually landed me somewhere where I could say, oh look, life is on my side for once – I finally had the confidence to think to myself, “This is it. I can now manage my resources and time independently towards my utmost craving for travels. There’s no stopping me now.” Then all of sudden, the coronavirus came out of nowhere – sort of. Leaving the world shattered in so many ways, in a blink of an eye. A personal long-term goal of mine included.

Until two months ago, I seemed to still have my 2020 plans (and beyond, to some extent) mapped out pretty well. I would spend weekends making a list of places I would’ve loved to visit this year, along with the corresponding dates to get the cheapest flight ticket. I had budgeted the spending for this year’s vacation and estimated how much I need to save each month to afford those. Earlier at the beginning of the year, obviously I had marked the calendar on my office desk with long weekend dates and some additional days where I planned to take my vacation as well. Those who have known me for quite some time might know that these are just the tips of the iceberg on how meticulously irritating I could get when planning something I am genuinely ecstatic about.

Even last year when I decided to sign with my current employer after long and thorough consideration, I thought at the very least that this was going to be the job that could take me to (literal) places and meet a whole bunch of new colleagues from all over the globe.* I had imagined all the mandatory trainings in Abu Dhabi and/or Melun that I, as a new hire, would be doing. Among all equally promising reasons, this was a pivotal one for me. This sort of opportunity was such a routine, a standard normal, a fact that has been going on in the company for literally decades that I didn’t stop to think if there was a remote possibility that for once, this might not be the case.

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