New Beginnings

Dear readers,

It has been just about a year since my last (also, uh, first 😅) blog post, and boy have things changed. One minute I was complaining about feeling stuck in a boring and dead-end job, the next I was rid of it! Yes – halfway through the year, I welcomed the first lay-off in my life at the ripe age of 23!

Funny how life works.

There I was, on a regular Thursday sitting at my cubicle and feeling unfulfilled as usual, when I received a foreboding and cryptic email from our director that read: “Please meet me in the conference room in 15 minutes, and do not inform your coworkers.” Is it not the perfect corporate nightmare to receive an email like this sent from the director personally in the middle of your day? Quickly enough, I was handed my termination letter alongside about a dozen others as we listened to our managers explain how there simply wasn’t enough in their budget to pay us anymore. We were assured time and again that our jobs were absolutely secure, even though the office experienced quite the slowdown in workload. Yet, here we all were with those dang letters in hand.

My immediate emotion was honestly excitement, because I had been so tired of sitting at the desk every day doing the same mundane tasks that were not going to improve my career in any way. Months before the layoff, I had been thinking I could do more than this, be better than this. I knew I was capable, I knew I was young enough to take risks, and I knew I could be so much more. The only problem was I could not for the life of me figure out what ‘more’ meant.

Looking back, all that thinking was practically futile. Sure, I was thinking of all the things I could do, all the paths I could take – but the thinking eventually pushed me down a spiral of overthinking, down a black hole of never-ending self-doubt and apprehension. I’ve gone the old school way and scribbled down all my ideas and how practical they were, made just about a dozen to-do lists of things I could try to do, learn, certify for etc… just to try to have a grasp on something I should set my mind to, to find one thing that I should commit to. The possibilities seemed endless, and yet, with each passing day my own abilities seemed more and more limited. If my mind settled on an idea, my brain scurried to come up with a thousand reasons why I would fail. If my heart decided to pursue a passion, my brain would be the first to list a hundred reasons why I’m not good enough. It was turtles all the way down.

When I got in my car and started driving home, my excitement melted into hollow disappointment. Yes, I was happy for a moment that I no longer worked a mind-numbing dead end job – but without the job, I felt like I was nothing. I graduated from university with a degree that didn’t get me anywhere (deep dive in another post, perhaps?), and I had no specialized skill under my belt. Months of brainstorming and plotting, and I had made no progress. I took no action. And now I don’t even have an income.

That was really the crux of it. I spent hours and days complaining about my comfort zone, only to never take a single step out of it.

Conveniently, my contract ended just days before a planned trip back home to Hong Kong to see my family and friends. I took the opportunity to extend the trip, spend more time with people I grew up with, and do some soul-searching. I had a wonderful time connecting and reconnecting with old friends, but I have to admit sometimes I felt gutted when we would talk their careers and their future plans. My kind, smart, and hardworking friends all seemed to know exactly what they were doing and where they wanted to go, while here I was not even knowing where to start. I travelled with family to Singapore and Busan the same summer, and for a brief moment I was able to let myself feel free and explore. However, soon after coming back to Canada, I regressed into overwhelming feelings of worthlessness and pessimism.

Job hunting has been difficult, to say the least. I scoured the Job Bank, Indeed, and LinkedIn for any job that I was even remotely qualified for. I spent hours adjusting my resume to each job, writing cover letters tailored to each position. Despite every application I submitted getting rejected, or perhaps not even seen by a pair of real human eyes, I kept applying. There were fake job postings everywhere, or scam postings that required hours of assessments only to ghost you completely after. I was even approached by an employer seeking to pay $10/hr. Even with adjustments to my resume, a complete overhaul of my LinkedIn profile, my applications were getting nowhere. And just like that, another three months had passed by.

By December, I was feeling completely distraught. Everyone was looking forward to taking a break over the holidays, after a year of hard work, as I lamented all the achievements I did not accomplish with all the time I had. I did not get a new job, I did not start anything new, and I did not take a single risk. All the time in the world for five months, and I had done absolutely nothing with it. We get about four thousand weeks in our lives, and I had spent twenty of them doing nothing. I felt like a complete failure.

That is, until this video popped up on my feed a couple of weeks ago. I highly recommend anyone with a dream to check it out – I’ve been replaying it whenever I have time because the speech just gets me so excited. He talks about creators specifically, but I think the idea applies to anyone who wants to do anything.

Do what you can’t.

I had been so consumed by my own doubt, I forgot I could just do it. I have savings, I have friends and family to support me, and I am free from the shackles of a 9-to-5 job. The universe has provided me with a chance to do anything I wanted to do, so why am I denying myself every opportunity to try something new? How was I supposed to do something I can’t, if I don’t even start? It was time the overthinking stopped. Instead of brainstorming, I started planning. I looked at my endless lists of possibilities, and picked one that was easiest to do right away.

It took some time and a hefty amount of courage, but I managed to put up a video on YouTube. A simple, bare-bones self-introduction video to get the ball rolling. And I kid you not, I feel so much better. Instead of wallowing in misery, I created something. I put something out to the world, and shared my thoughts. The editing process was genuinely fun, and I found a great satisfaction when the video had been published. At the time of this article, the video has 11 views – and that does not bother me even slightly. I feel so proud for crafting something and posting it online, and I’ve effectively given myself something to look forward for. My ideas suddenly don’t seem so far-fetched, and life doesn’t seem so dull anymore.

There are a few ideas I have lined up for the first quarter of this year, including more videos and the completion of this website + building a portfolio. I plan to close an idea loop every 90 days or so to stop overwhelming myself and falling down the spiral again. This will surely ease the stress of endless ghosting and rejections from future job applications, too. I’m very excited about what’s ahead for me, and I hope everyone is able to find the same excitement for themselves as well.

Happy New Year! ❤️