relax

for present day me, it’s knowing that i have a busy week ahead of me at work this week, and my boss’ threat looming over my head about possible “48 hours without sleeping”-type requests during a week she is out. she has the tendency to be overbearing when she does not have control. kind of like me i guess - which is what makes it so repulsive to see in others. for fourteen year old me, maybe the same anxiety was about a test i did not study for, or having to face classmates that i didn’t want to see, or trying to predict ahead of time how to get out of getting called on in class. 

all these little things fade away when i see the forest for the trees. it’s not the person or the assignment that i’m actually dreading, it’s the experience of life itself.

the experience of life. life is unpredictable. inherently so. some parts of it are more predictable than others, like the commute to and from these second spaces (work and school), or the friends we keep in touch with on a daily basis as a touchpoint from the outside world. but other things, like feedback from a boss, or whether or not a teacher will call on me in class, are less predictable. i cannot know when they’ll call upon me for input. 

if i could reach a hand out to my fourteen year old self sitting in the corner of that english classroom - hiding behind her bangs on top of all that - i would tell her that there is nothing to be afraid of. she did the assigned reading (if she didn’t, then that’s a different story. bs-ing can only last you so far, as twenty eight year old me has come to learn from personal experience and observing others in the workplace). having read the source material is what allows her to form an opinion, which of itself is value to others. this is because my opinion can only come from me directly. for example, even if you harassed my best friend for my opinion, she couldn’t possibly know what i feel about certain topics. she could make educated guesses, but she isn’t privy to what’s in my mind. she absolutely isn’t the mind who is writing this on a word doc, for one thing.

it’s easy to say that to my fourteen year old self now that i’ve been there, done that. but as “big and scary” as i make my work (and boss) out to be in my head, when boiled down to the basic elements they are really no different from the reading assignments of my teen years. i didn’t know it then, but i’d later re-read my blog posts about this time period and go out of my way to re-read these assigned high school reading books for fun. FUN! even when it was the furthest thing from fun back then to discuss Goodbye Columbus, it is now on my to-read shelf because I want to put myself in someone else’s mind. it’s the same way when someone might read my words or talk with me, because they want to put themselves in my mind. 

my opinions have value after all. no one can make these up for me. so i may as well express them. 

perhaps these imagined scenarios i’ve always been so afraid of were opportunities all along. perhaps i was so afraid because i knew i had a lot to express, which i was actively repressing on a daily basis. perhaps, somewhere inside me, lives a belief that it’s wrong for me to express certain things, like saying no to a request that I think is unreasonable or pointing it out whenever a friend’s expression of “i love yous” felt empty. 

One fine Friday evening after a loaded work week, I am in my room with my contacts drying the hell out of my eyes at 9pm with a thought: what did I used to enjoy whenever I was home alone with no plans? Oh right, that’s telling friends (and strangers) on the internet every little detail about my life. As if my Tumblr were a person, I found myself wondering how my blog is doing now. 

Entering yuchu.tumblr.com into the address bar, I know exactly what to expect - the same bonobono icon on the left, and a front page that no longer supported infinite scrolling so my blog is forever frozen in the last 10 posts I made. Interesting to see this relic still looking exactly like I’d left it. Clicking around, I find my 100happydays tag where I diligently wrote every day for 100 days. 

As I manually scroll through the pages (by adding the page to the end of the URL each time I reached the bottom), I catch some excerpts that completely surprise me. Such as the fact that I felt I needed to go on a diet, so I stopped eating breakfast… yet accepted poptarts from a classmate every 2nd period. Or the way I shamelessly shared a picture of what looked like a therapy worksheet that another classmate had accidentally left in my math textbook, listing every detail about what made her happy, what she looked forward to, and her dreams for the future (privacy clearly did not cross my mind in those days).

Nowadays, I am pretty private when it comes to my inner world. I make the occasional reel on instagram here and there, which is the closest it gets to sharing my observations in a public forum. It’s laughably abbreviated compared to the detailed account of my everyday surroundings, people I ate with and my history with those meal companions, and projects I was working on for an english class via the blog.

I manage to update my theme (finally) after tinkering around for a half hour, so now I can click through the pages. After what I assume has been 9 years (judging from how my description still claims I am 19 - I’m 28 now, you’re welcome for doing the math), I finally have an updated theme for the new generation of the internet. 

This feels like a significant moment. Throughout my mid 20s (notice I didn’t include my early 20s, where I was constantly riding the adrenaline high of newfound “adulthood”), I have always felt like there was more I could be sharing, more that I could be doing to connect with others in a meaningful way other than playing around with a phone screen to make a reel. Yes, writing on Tumblr was definitely my form of “playing around on a phone screen” back then, but I had a larger canvas to work with. In a reel within the confines of Instagram, I am subject to using other people’s music, other people’s filters, and photos of other people and other people’s possessions. But on tumblr, these words are entirely my own. No more, no less. 

Words are so powerful, I realize only as I begin harnessing them for self expression. I don’t know where this will take me or what the future of my “blogging” hobby will become, but I want to rekindle my relationship with this medium — the return on investment is too high to ignore. See: how past me directly helped present me with one post that suggested listening to music while stressed, or feeling seen by another post that reveals how deeply rooted my anxiety around speaking up is - something that I still manage on a daily basis at work, that i can afford to give myself more grace around.

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So here I am now at my local library writing this the next morning. Originally this story was for one of the exercises in “What Color Is Your Parachute?” where the goal is to extract skills i possess from retelling an episode in my life, but it turned into something much more - recognizing how I feel at home on the page more than anywhere else in the world and that this part of me had been in hibernation for years. YEARS!!

There’s so much lived experience from the last few years that I want to memorialize for future me (and my audience’s) benefit. One of my good friends Sharon observed that I operate on “fixations” - no different from how lifestyle youtubers showcased their “Monthly Favorites” (do people still make those?). Well my current fixation is on personal finance, and the idea of compounding is the object of my fixation at the moment. 

Compounding is the idea that small investments towards our goals over time - whether financial or non-financial - compound to returns so great that they are inconceivable to present day us, what the young kids call "delulu" but is completely real. 

Applied to blogging, I am intrigued by the returns that I cannot see, yet feel so viscerally. That with just a quick glimpse at an old post I am pulled through space and time into the year 2014, and can instantly recognize what fears had consumed me in those times and what hopes I had for myself (they weren’t much, given how low my self-esteem was LOL!). 

the biggest return of all, though, is how writing reveals — in a “show not tell” manner — how my core traits are still the same: preferring to speak in emotions rather than facts (ask me: "how was [xyz vacation?] i'll unabashedly give you a 5 minute ted talk on all the ways the trip enhanced my life and upgraded my friendship dynamic, but don't expect me to name a single landmark of what i saw), and daring to be vulnerable when it comes to the subjects and people most important to me. The returns I cannot see are felt in how far I’ve come, and how proud I am to be the person I am now because as they say, I have “fought to become her.” 

writing connects me with my past and future selves, and keeps them alive. this relationship with myself is not a fixation, but a lifestyle.