twenty seconds of your life

with my life because I know at least my existence is meaningful, at least to my husband and my parents.

probably not really to my parents bcs they don't have a choice, but my husband definitely chose me :)

i should remember that more and more when i'm feeling tired of this world. like when i was confused of what's my purpose in life.

probably there is no purpose. and probably it was ok. i think my dad was right all along. whatever you do, you do it for your family. (probably it wasn't what he means but that's how i interpreted it lol). probably i was born without a burning passion to something, it wasn't in my blood. i'm not like my husband who *consciously* chose music as his... way of life.

i have a feeling that the way my mom told me to grow up and then have my own money is that so that i can be independent. that i can buy things with my own money. no wonder i got "independence" as one of my core values.

i think that's it. that's what i wanted in life -- to be able to do whatever i want. a bit meta, though. i remember when someone asked me about whats my purpose in life, i kind of say that i want a comfortable life and i want others to also have comfortable life.

probably i don't necessarily want others to be able to life a comfortable life. i think i 'm just caring about my own life and i use it as the standard for others.

it's crazy. there was a friend, an old friend, who fought his way so hard through cancer. and he just said goodbye to the world.

i never realized that it would make me feel this way. bad news come and go. it's crazy that i wasn't even this devastated when i lost my grandma or whatever.

i don't know what it is. probably because my grandma was old and the time was anyway gonna be near?

------

this person... i met him back in middle school. i fancied him, obviously. he's a bit of an introvert, i think. he's smart, i knew it back then. what i didn't know was that he's also super witty. amazing person. also a good person. good guy.

and then when i went to univ, we met again. his gf from back then was jealous as hell. i wasn't even close to him. sometimes i did yahoo messenger him, yes. i remember there was one instance when we ate roti bakar together... that was the only time we EVER went out I guess, irl. i don't even remember what did we talk about. i just remembered that i got sleepy and he kept talking lol.

then i guess we didn't really keep in touch. i apparently asked him a favor when i lived in jakarta, to get something for univ administration. when i did my master's i sometimes talked to him because we got a mutual friend.

then we went back to indonesia and apparently he worked in the same company as me. in 2018.

our path crossed multiple times. in the meantime he managed to became the CTO of a startup, worked his way in the corporate mess of my old office, got married and became a father.

the last time we talked to each other was probably 2018. or I probably wished him well the first time he fought cancer last year. i never met his wife, never met his daughter. didn't even tell condolences to his wife directly. i knew no one from his family.

-------

i'm lighting a candle for him. it's burning through the night. i think i just want him to be alive, i don't know why. his passing made me sad as hell. it's a different feeling from when my sister also passed. i think since i have no clue how exactly my sister died, it's still a mystery to me, so i was more confused than sad. also probably i didn't have time to be sad because i was 24/7 with my mom (who was definitely depressed i belief.. just bursted into tears all the time).

i don't know i just can't believe it omg.

i think the only way to accept him is to acknowledge that indeed we all belong to Allah and only to Him we shall return.

I'm following allthingseurope on Tumblr. It's there when I'm tired of traveling -- everyone knows I'm old :)

I'm supposed to write a proposal for a trip to Athena, Thessaloniki, and Skopje, where I've never been to.

With my husband I'm supposed to save so I could go to Edinburgh, Aqaba, and Sofia.

when other people keep achieving lots of things. for others, instagram is toxic. for me it's linkedin since they are just full of other people's achievements and i feel like i'm just procrastinating here because i am not sure where to begin.

also when they have fancy titles like the ones i have always wanted (but thank god now i know for sure that their life sucks) and when other people already buy property (in indonesia) while i know for sure that now i can't own property in indonesia since i'm married to a foreigner.

also when u r alone doing sahur and iftar and u envy ppl in indonesia who has such a supportive environment. but well -- you get a better empathy this way since you're more alone ;)

i think i'm trying to prove myself too much that in the end i'm not doing anything... but i hope i'm still doing good in my volunteering.

i know anyway that probably some of the people envy my life... i have a very very understanding husband who supports all of my aspirations and decision and super caring to me, a normal family in-law who expects nothing, a steady job including a permanent contract, a roof and food and everything... ok

I had this back in 2020 when people just send each other food etc during lebaran but I was like, IT'S OK, IT'S CORONA, EVERYONE'S DEPRESSED. Sending & receiving gifts were amazing. But now I'm in NL and I did not send or receive anything from anyone (it's a totally different thing here, I got shit here around my bday and not lebaran time) plus I have this medical condition which makes me unable to do fasting so I'm a bit mehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh and likeeeeee

I saw all my Indonesian instagram friends sending and receiving hampers in Ramadan and I was a bit jealous and sad

....

(oh and apparently it's a bit controversial, looking at the Twitter discourse lol)

....

So in the end since I felt so alone I just decided to send something to 3 people without any personal connection - one orphan in Mali plus two education support for underprivileged children in Indonesia. It's going to be a monthly sponsoring thing (probably until they're able to support themselves, who knows how many years in the future) so I canceled my Coursera & LinkedIn subscription.

Hope it can help me cope with this sad alone situation :/ plus anyway it makes me interact (as a donor) to NGO's, one religious and one secular (probably I wanted to create an NGO in the future, one of my dreams is to set up a scholarship anyway since I know how annoying it is to have an itch to studylearn something but you have no means aka money)

(via https://open.spotify.com/track/76ZDwA8uTyMys4LIS3pBUX?si=BT4_qqDkTzK7NEFQezdnmg)

So here I am, back to Tumblr, because I found a way to circumvent Indonesia’s Tumblr restriction #duh #withredditandvimeoaswell

I like writing. I don’t know why, but I just realized again yesterday that I like it. It’s too bad I lost my blog last year (since I didn’t pay the hosting and the domain... It’s my fault, but there were too many things happening last year that it was in the very bottom of my priority). 

So here’s the rambling again....

The year 2020 has ended and with it my job at HCID. It was a weird day. The day before at 5pm I was still leading a meeting, sharing screen and coordinating and all the things. On the D-day, I felt sad -- I just realized I have lost a structure and a livelihood. This is a stark contrast with the whole month of December (which is just “waiting for my last day” kind of thing), where having my last day was supposed to be some kind of a relief.

Why a relief though, you asked. I had thought of leaving my job before December 2020 to have more time for myself - to find out what I actually want to do, learn what I actually want to learn, your usual “searching for yourself” shit. My entire career had been based on the opportunities available for me at a certain point in time and I never thought of the actual vision of where I’m heading. I didn’t have my north star. My plan was to use the first months of this “sabbatical” period to strengthen my personal and professional identity. I realized this ever since I was still at BL, probably April 2019. It caused some kind of a quarter life crisis where I cried in the backseat of my parent’s car over a trivial thing.

And then reality hit me like a truck...

Personal time? Check. Enough time? Nope. Day 6 of the new year I have to do an interview with a company there and I needed to quickly find out all those personal and professional goal, at least the MVP version of it. Why? Because in my previous interview, it was one of the questions that made me failed. Like, I didn’t have a clear vision of what I wanted to learn within the area of agile (my specialty). Duh, I didn’t even have a purpose, why should I have a learning roadmap? It was very interesting because 2 years before I wrote an article about a Newbie Agile Coach’s Learning Journey on LinkedIn, which was created partly because it was the requirements for the job postings in The Netherlands. The roadmap contained all the things I have to master to be able to fulfill those job postings. Now that I have achieved it, I am lost because I didn’t have anything in my horizon. I’m at then end. It was like when I really wanted to visit New York and finally I did. (lol but and then what? ok then next goal is to visit all the continents lololol)

But nah, now I found it. More precisely, I defined it. It was a way to continually being a part of endeavor of improving people’s lives and that I wanted to make an always-increasing contribution to that. It’s not exactly a career goal, but I have my north star now. Now it’s just the matter of putting it into practice wherever I am. What was supposed to take months is now done in 2 days because apparently a deadline falls from the sky. Like an angel, but instead of being nice to me it gives me an angry face telling me YOU’VE PROCRASTINATED SO MUCH, NOW YOU CAN’T RELAX. GO FIND YOUR LIFE PURPOSE AND PREPARE FOR INTERVIEW. Lol!