finding meaning in unexpected places
a summary of my mind space over the last month
Life is short, time is precious, and I often feel guilty when I don't understand why I'm doing something. I hate the feeling of time passing by and not being the one in charge of my own destiny.
That's a bit of how I felt at the end of December. As the year was coming to an end, so was the time that I gave myself to freely explore and figure out what it is exactly that I wanted to do. What are the next steps of my career that would make me happy and fulfilled? I remember during an end of the year reflection writing session, feeling so lost in who I am, without purpose or a goal that I was sure of, that I could go full speed towards. With a little more than a week left until the end of the year, how can I go into the next year without a real understanding of who I am and what the next ideal picture of life looks like?
When I don't have a goal in mind, I'm just floating, in space with absolutely no support or direction. I'm reminded of how much easier it was during school, when the next steps were so obvious and easy and defined for you and as an adult, much of what you're learning your first couple of years in the real world is how to find your own path for yourself, building your own railings and staircase that guide you to your north star.
Recently, I booked a spontaneous trip to a beach town in Mexico with a friend. It was a town that I've never heard of before and knew nothing about beyond the brief few sentence description that she gave me. Yet, I immediately said yes when the request came up. I love being a spontaneous person, someone's who's always down for adventure, but this decision really made me ask myself, could I possibly be too spontaneous? When you're just saying yes to everyone and everything around you, what is your focus? When are you taking charge of your own life and time? Especially at a time when I was so unsure about what I was doing in my own life, for a while, I couldn't understand how this action fit into my journey or why it was happening.
This is something that I hated about the version of myself when I lived in nyc. I never got over having fomo. but that's because I didn't know who I was or the person that I wanted to be. I didn't know how to guide my own time and activities to become a version of myself that I would be proud of. I told myself I was having fun, but in reality I was just constantly distracted by every type of event and every single party, every time a new person reaches out to hang, and the millionth new hobby to try. The idea of fomo was real, but fomo is only real when you don't know who you are and what the life that you want to build looks like. So you say yes, ask around, get input from other people, to build and put your puzzle pieces together. You go try new things, you hear new stories and possibilities and figure out what the answer to your own life adventures might be and what the right next steps look like. I think it's a phase that all of us go through, and should go through, but a phase that I'm so excited to be leaving behind in my life, at least for now.
At the beginning of this year, I set an arbitrary goal of a role I thought could be something that I wanted in the near future, got Claude to make me a 3 month plan that gets me there with a week by week, day by day, hourly schedule from 7AM to 10PM. It was something that I experimented with for the first 10 days of the year as an attempt to get me back closer to that person that I used to be, in the moments that I was most proud of. The schedule looked a little something like this:
It got me to producing, and I got to start iterating on my own patterns. It ended up looking more like this practically after shifting things around to fit in errands and misc items:
Here are some things that I found that I enjoyed:
carving time for daily and weekly planning, having a solid idea of what the focus of each day and coming week is. This was never something I used to do, but was really helpful in building out structure for myself, especially when I don't have a boss or anyone else to answer to
end of the day reflections — I didn't end up doing this everyday, but I enjoyed the moments when I can be honest with myself in improving my routine and figuring out what worked. This was perhaps something that I used to be scared of, to confront myself that I somehow failed to make the best plan. But you have to iterate in order to make the next days even better for yourself
starting the day early - I love a 7AM or even 6:30AM start. The feeling of getting 5 things done before noon is empowering like no other
defined deep work time — It made me more okay with not seeing a single other message from a soul because I knew that time period was defined and going to end, practicing eliminating distractions for real. It also gave me deadlines to start work, not being able to give myself to be lenient with myself to start working 15 mins, 30 min or even a whole hour later, helped me to encourage myself to do mundane things faster like getting ready
As well as aspects that I didn't like:
the frequent context switching - having so many blocks that did different things, some of them too short to get anything meaningful done
lack of a cohesive theme tying the different activities together — a bit related to the previous point, but when creating content didn't relate to the coding or design work that I was doing, it didn't feel like these individual activities were working towards one identity, but rather multiple versions of myself that were fighting each other to win
the idea that work had to be confined to a block of time — this was great when I got too distracted and it helped to extend the length of time i convinced myself to keep going when things got hard, but was also difficult for when I got in flow and wanted to work on something for much much longer. I didn't know how to shift things around to make it all fit and it almost felt like I HAD to take a break at a certain hour in order to wake up in time the next morning.
There were definitely aspects of this plan that I enjoyed experimenting with and gave me a really good baseline to work with, but overall is still a work in progress.
As the trip to Mexico was coming up, I was now able to take it as a true refresh and reflect opportunity. It gave me a chance to put all the floating thoughts for my future down with pen and paper. A new topic for each day of the trip to clearly think through each aspect of my life.
Personal Life Direction — What could life look like in 1, 5 and 10 years? What are 3 alternate realities you can see yourself living in?
Romantic Relationships — What did you learn from your previous relationships and what do you want to bring into your future relationships?
Hobbies and How Your Spend Your Time — What are the activities you are doing right now? Which of these do you want to spend more, less or the same amount of time on?
Family Relationships — What would an ideal relationship with your immediate and more distant family members look like?
It was surprising how the moment you put the pen to paper, the right ideas solidified and any alternatives that you start listing suddenly feel so out of place. These aren't thoughts that came out of nowhere, but rather a compilation of my mind over the last couple of months. I don't know how to completely describe this feeling, other than to say when you know, you know. It felt good for the first time in months, to be so sure of what my ideal future looks like.
Other than the reflecting part, we got to do daily yoga, eat so so much incredibly good food, and enjoy beach sunsets and poolside views. This trip reminded me to be open to opportunities and people, even if something may look mundane, it can stand out in unexpected way during unexpected moments. It taught me that as long as you are intentional in your everyday and to keep looking for purpose, the right ones with emerge and make sense to the bigger picture, bringing you forward, one step at a time.
I don't have much of a life motto other than to dream big, be optimistic towards challenges and to always take charge of your actions to shape life in the way that you have envisioned. Things tend to work out when you do just those three things, and even unexpected times and places can add meaningfully to your life.
P.S. if you are interested in watching the reels that I've made throughout the trip, you can find them here