Does it really take the whole world to crumble for two creatures to coincidentally find a home in each other’s presence, two siblings to make long-overdue amends, and a mediocre character to take their first step towards digging what should never have never been buried for nearly two decades?
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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.)
Back in my undergraduate years, my galaxy-printed tee and pink chevron-patterned tee are the kinds of clothing I’d pick to go to my university classes. Along with my peach-coloured Jansport backpack, a chevron-patterned wooden necklace from a local brand, and a pair of textured plastic flat shoes with ornamental ribbon which I didn’t hesitate to wear to my geology classes. I loved splurging my money on fashion items, and loved wearing them even more. My particular preference was probably anything that did not typically scream “basic.”
As I grew older and finally discovered more meaningful means to allocate my money to, I decided that one of the best ways to effectively put more budget to those things is by reducing my spending on clothing. I’d still be into fashion, but from that moment on, I would try to support my passion in different, hopefully more responsible ways.
Despite being still way too far from living minimally (and hopefully, more ethically, consciously, and sustainably someday), I decided that at least, getting rid of my clothes from those fashion-holic eras was a must-do, in order to convert my wardrobe into a capsule one. I also started collecting mood boards on Pinterest, such as here and here, to help myself choose some modest basic styles that would still bring pleasure when I wear them.
This article defines capsule wardrobe as “a limited collection of clothes that coordinate well and can be worn in a number of different ways to cater for multiple occasions.” Essentially, the idea is to keep only the most essential pieces of clothing that would go along with each other regardless of the occasion, therefore keeping the number of your clothes to a minimum. It also typically includes only items with earthy colours, since these tones are the ones that can be easily combined with each other.
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.
Disclaimer: I know I’m not in any way qualified to really have a trusted opinion about this, since I never even had any first-hand experience on this topic. The last time I made myself available in the dating arena was in 2013 and I had (luckily) settled with one person ever since. Nonetheless, if you still want to read my thoughts despite my absolute lack of experience, here goes!
When referring to modern dating, some of us may associate it with online dating, hence involves dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, and so forth; or some dating websites, e.g. Setipe.com (is this even still a thing? I don’t even know). But what I’m about to talk about is closely related as well to other means such as ta’aruf, perhaps. Hence the bracketed modern in the title, because as far as I know, ta’aruf– or whichever term they called it in another sides of the globe – has been around since the first Muslim civilization, as the only way that is actually encouraged within Islam.
Essentially, I’m referring to a way of finding a potential partner through something other than through mutual circles, where you and the other party may not have any acquantaince and/or circle in common. In short, where you both started as regular, complete strangers. And particularly in nowadays world where almost everyone we personally know seems to have made certain trails on the internet.
As one of those people who regularly creates some digital footprints all over the web ever since I was introduced to internet, i.e. through this blog (and some of my older blogs), Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Tumblr, Medium, Facebook, and so forth – I mean, look at all the social media links I listed on the top right corner of this website, and that’s just a tiny percentage of myself that are out there like an open book for anybody to study – I feel like it might be very daunting if I were to be someone who’s currently on the hunt for a significant other and then I came across and became interested in someone whose online presence resembling mine, with digital imprints from at least the past decade literally being spread across everywhere on the internet.
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.
