journal/

on-going mostly unedited stream of thoughts
March 8, 2015

The courage to be ourselves

Someone once told me that we have to dress for the job we want to have. I thought: if how I dress is the way you perceive how serious I am about my work, we have a much bigger problem here.

I am in my mid-thirties, but I look like I am 15, small-built, Asian and female. Except that I don’t actually look very feminine, or what people perceive as feminine. I have hair shorter than most men I know, I don’t wear dresses and I stay 3 feet away from makeup.

People think I am deliberately presenting myself as non-feminine, but honestly, I don’t know and care what my gender truly is, I just present as myself. I like having my hair short not because it represents masculinity, but it is pure joy to have hair that doesn’t feel like it is weighing you down. Everyone should try it some day. I don’t wear dresses because I find them cumbersome, not to mention that I find the idea of having a collection of shoes to match the dresses tiring. I don’t wear makeup because it is extremely uncomfortable for me — imagine this, I don’t even like hair on my head, much less an extra layer on my face.

I guess I just want to feel as light-weight as possible.

I relate a lot to the sexist attitudes in tech presented in this post. I couldn’t help but think about the situations I have faced myself, and feel almost sorry that I had not only faced bias because of my gender, or lack of one — depending on who I meet — but I face bias based on my perceived age (15, not kidding, people ask me where I go to school or where my parents are), my build (not towering enough to win a room), my race.

I have barely even started on the parts of me that is not visible.

When we first applied for my work visa a few years ago, I didn’t have a college degree, so I had to prove that I have a decade’s worth of work experience. It was difficult and stressful, for a short moment in time, I contemplated going back to school. I even found myself wondering if it was a mistake to give up on college. Everything in life is a tradeoff, right? Sometimes we have to do a lot of the things we do not like in order to get to the things we want.

I could have gone to college, grown my hair long, wear makeup and don power suits so I don’t look 15, put on 6-inch heels to make myself look taller. It would have made a lot of my life, much easier. I did actually go through a part of my very early 20s doing all of that. My soul started disintegrating, and perhaps if I was less sensitive I would have put up with all of that. Some part of me wished that I could carry on with that — I attributed the willingness to be someone you are not for a greater purpose as strength and resilience.

But I would be participating and buying into a system I don’t believe in. What goes?

I had spent another 4 years of my career working entirely remotely as an independent designer. I would only work asynchronously through email, there would be no phone or video calls, no in-person meetings.

Apart from valuing my time and freedom (wasn’t aware of my introversion back then), I did it because I felt unsafe. I couldn’t trust that I would be judged and interacted with, based on the merit of my work, that people would attribute the worth of my work through their perception of my physical presence. I had attempted to go independent without placing such boundaries earlier in my career — coincided with the long hair— and ended up desperately escaping from it. That’s another story for another day.

That 4 years gave me the safety and space I needed to grow into myself and build up my body of work. I didn’t have to worry about how I would present myself or if my inability to express myself verbally would impact the perception of my work. I had the written word to lean on.

But I am incredibly blessed and privileged. I was a designer by trade, so I could depend on work that was highly visible as a representation of my value. I could have continued hiding myself from the world if I wanted to.

What about the others?

This is why, despite that it really seems the hell easier if I bought into the system, to be who people wanted just so we can skip the bullshit and focus on the work at hand, I refuse to do so.

I struggle with this all the time. To be aware that people do not take me seriously because of how I look andpresent myself and yet persist in doing so.I do not want to live in a world that you have to be: white, male, old, tall, attractive, with expensive suits and shoes to boot, armed with ivy league degrees and an old boys’ network that comes with college alumni, with behaviors of aggression mistaken for confidence, displays of power misunderstood for capability — in order to succeed.

I want to be who I want to be — with the way I feel most comfortable presenting myself as, armed with huge doses of empathy, with immense curiosity and open-mindedness, the desire to learn without formalinstitutions, to be quiet and introspective, to have the energy that demonstrates my capacity to listen and collaborate, that I know enough that I do not know enough. I think confidence is over-rated and humility is under-rated.

I want to be this person, not to “succeed”, or by any conventional metrics and perception of what success means, but to carry the weight and gift of what it means to be human:

We are all beautiful unique individuals, and carry different innate gifts within ourselves, yet we can all work together for the collective good, while respecting and admiring the difference and diversity we have as a species.

It takes courage to be ourselves, it takes a lot of hard work and self-awareness.But we are continually building a world that other people live in, that means at every step of the road, we need to continually ask ourselves, what kind of world do we want our kids to live in? Do we want a world where they have to disown their beautiful personalities just to fit in our idea of what it takes tosucceed? That it is celebrated that we spend our formative years disowning who we are?

If my entire life is just spent on struggling to be who I am, I think that is worth it. I am claiming my stake in this world’s future, that perhaps one day, it is not too audacious dreaming of a world where people can be whoever they want to be, look whatever they want to look, and they no longer have to doubt if they are worth a seat at the table, or try to oppress each other because we are afraid that there’s not enough seats at the table, so we can really roll up our sleeves and do what we are supposed to do:

Create a world that expresses our innate potential as human beings, not the fucking mess it is right now.

That starts from now. By being who we are, we are creating a safe space for other people to be who they are. We are changing perceptions and definitions for what it looks like to be <insert whoever you want to be>.

I wrote this because I read “Coding Like a Girl”:

But if you feel up to it, I encourage you wear exactly what you want. Be as flamboyant, fancy, frilly, girly as you would like to be. Do it while being a gamer, a programmer, a game designer. Because you are helping to change people’s ideas of what a programmer/gamer/game developer looks like.

Originally published on Medium.

February 20, 2015

on self-love and working hard

I spent the last five days working remotely, because I needed to be alone and near nature. In between sprints, I took time to be under the sun, doing nothing, except closing my eyes and allowing my thoughts to wash over me. 

This was not voluntary. I was forced to take lengthy breaks, because I have been nursing a chronic eye strain that wouldn’t go away. It was either I rest my eyes, or I will be in pain. If I was in perfect health, I would be either working my bones out, or trying to sponge myself in information. 

I ended up feeling like I accomplished more than I ever would if I had sat eight hours straight in the office, but I had this ambient sense that I didn’t work hard enough, precisely because I didn’t sit in front of a screen for eight hours straight. 

This is not logical, and it is ridiculous. Why am I measuring the quality of my work with the time I had spent on it? 

I think society has conditioned us to believe that we have to feel all drained, stressed and anxious to feel like we have really worked our asses off. It seems wrong to feel relaxed and centered after finishing a challenging task. Yet dealing with complexity requires mental clarity and focus. How do we solve problems when we keep feeling like we are about to break apart anytime?

I blame my lack of self-love. Really. If I loved myself enough, I would know that I am enough. I don’t have to feel like I have to wear myself out to deserve a seat at the table. If I trusted myself enough, I would have faith that I would be able to accomplish the work, regardless of how much time I have spent on it, or how hard I felt like I worked at it.

If I truly care about the work, I need to rise above my personal neuroses and see that the work itself is not asking me to over-work myself, it is asking of me to do it well.

It is an on-going journey, fraught with more challenges, to be more honest with myself. Am I working so hard because of the work, or because I need to be validated?

Sometimes, it becomes worse as I realize I am not seeking validation from other people, but from myself, because I just do not love myself, enough.

February 18, 2015

taking a break from myself

I remember on my first week at Medium, I was asked to introduce myself to the company, and one of the questions was, “What do you do for fun?”. I answered, almost embarrased, “I contemplate on life.”

20 months later, I was having a conversation with Joyce, and she was telling me how she feels, day after day, passing by cold and hungry people in front of our office.

I alluded to her that I was having similar feelings – except that I am having a chronic fatigue of having these feelings. It was in that moment that I realized once again, that I really don’t have a separation of work and life. At work, I think about how to make people care about financial inclusion, out of work, even before working at Stellar, I’ve been reading, writing, conversing on how to facilitate change. It is what I do out of work that defines me, it is just that I am really blessed to do the same at my day job.

I was tossing and turning in bed last night, and I had a sudden onslaught of panic, where I had another realization that I will never be able to get away from my thoughts, ever. I’m stuck in my own head – I have claustrophobia, and I can tell you right now that that moment wasn’t very pleasant for me. This is why people meditate, and also why people kill themselves.

The worst thing is, I can’t think of anything else I would rather do. It is not like I can give up being myself, or the work I care about, and go on a party binge or something. I would still be stuck with these feelings, these thoughts, wherever I go, whatever I do.

I don’t have any answers for myself, except I will probably need to work out how to transmute these feelings of weight and fatigue. I go through these phases where I feel like I’m growing into a new self, and I am like getting to know myself over again. This is where all my previous assumptions of myself will fail, and it is extremely uncomfortable.

I am in one of such phases right now, where I am trying to put pieces of myself back together again, in order to fit in new pieces, and throw away the ones which no longer fit.

Perhaps, just perhaps, it is easier if I simply accept that these pieces will never truly fit together, and the protruding edges are what that truly makes me, me.

February 15, 2015

pace

One of the hardest things I have to learn, is how to pace myself. The more I love something, the more energy I expend upon it, the faster I burn out. It is counter-intuitive that in order to sustain myself, I have to moderate the way I love.

It is not helping that I am constantly feeling like I am in a race against time. The more I understand morality, the more I accept transience, the more I wish to cherish the present, the more I try to squeeze what I can in these moments. I end up asking more of myself, I just want to do more of everything, deathly afraid that one day I will lose the privilege of doing the things I love. It is not just about me either, at the back of my head I am always aware that the planet is also in a race against time. I don’t feel good at all that San Francisco is experiencing twenty-something degree celcius weather in mid-february.

I feel like I either need to be either always working or have my head in a book, so I am not taking even a single second for granted. As a result, I have been having a chronic strain in my eyes, permeating the left side of my head since the turn of the year.

It upsets me. It upsets me that it is no longer about how much I wish to accomplish, but I am limited by the fragility of my body. I can probably stretch my mental or physical energy with diet and exercise, but I am not sure if I can do much about my eyes, apart from resting them. I am forced to read a lot less, even for pleasure. I set out the year wanting to both write and read much more than the last, but within a month I had to re-evaluate everything.

I am exhausted, and I am finding it more difficult to recover to a full charge. I am experiencing signs of burn out, and I am terrified. They say you don’t experience burn out if you love your work, I think I am experiencing burn out because I love my work too much. I just can’t stop thinking about all the things we should be doing or can be doing.

I feel like I am forced to take a step back because I know what happens if I continue down this path. I have experienced severe burn out before and it is not pretty. It upsets me that I seem to have a weaker constitution than average, or it could simply be that I am simply more prone to over-stimulation than the average. There is always a tradeoff, a price to pay.

This time I am learning that loving something sometimes means having the capacity to remove myself from it, take a few steps back and take a good hard look at the bigger picture.

Perhaps for someone like me, giving myself intensely in an all-consuming manner is the easy part, learning to pace myself so that I can sustain the longer journey, is a much harder lesson to learn.

February 7, 2015

keep on trying

I think I’ve mentioned a few times that I don’t really have much faith in humanity – there have been too many instances where we have collectively chosen the easy over the difficult, the short-term versus the long-term, the choice to perpetuate negativity over positivity.

It remains a disconnect, between my entire cynicism of humanity and my idealism for change. I think my idealism is sustained by the fact that history does not depend on the majority to change, and that time and time again, we have shown tremendous resilience despite the damage some of us have chosen to do. You do not need everyone to believe you in order to start a war, but you do not need to get buy-in from everyone to start building rockets too.

Sometimes I think we tend to over-focus on the current slice of time, forgetting the progress we have made over thousands of years. Similarly, we take for granted what has been handed to us on a plate precisely because of the work that has been done by the previous generations.

I find it difficult to take my privilege for granted, and I want to say that the concept of meritocracy is bullshit. It annoys me to no end when people say success will come when you work hard. There are people in this world, billions of them in fact, that will not see the light at the end of the tunnel no matter how hard they work. They are screwed over by their socio-economic factors, which are largely dependent about their geographic location. I resent it people tell me that I deserve my “success”, as opposed to other people not deserving theirs because they didn’t choose to work hard enough, however “success” is being defined. I cannot tell you how many times I had to depend on the random colliding of events to even be alive, much less anything else.

Yes, I worked hard, yes, I showed up too, and I took giant leaps of faith. But I recognize the fact that I was born at the right place, at the right time, and that made all the difference to my life. I am sorry, but it doesn’t take an economist to point out the fact that I could work my bones off but it wouldn’t have mattered if I was born in a place where even basic literacy is a challenge or if I was born at a time when gender-equality or technology was not in my favor. I also consider myself very lucky to have my skills recognized at a time when they are in demand, but I remember the early decade in my life when I had to fight really hard to work in design.

I could look back in time and said that I made the right bets, but who knew?

I think about all the people who have suffered in order for me to be comfortably typing this piece in my chair today. I think about people like Alan Turing, the activists who gave up their lives and security, I think about the countless people who lost their lives in wars, so that I can have a taste of peace.

So I won’t lie. I find it incredibly frustrating when I see us focusing our effort and energy into things that do not matter at this point in time. Yes, when we have achieved world peace, I don’t care if we want to make the next generation photo-sharing app, but right now, there are really more important problems to solve.

Yet, it is easy for me to not even try, because I genuinely do not see how we can dig ourselves out of the massive hole we’ve created, so I may as well sit back, or retire in the mountains. If I truly believe the end will be the same, why do I repeatedly put myself in uncomfortable situations just for the hope of a little change? I don’t enjoy putting myself out there all the time, I don’t enjoy facing so much demoralization because well, guess what? The people doing the work can’t help but be cynical too. Time and time again, we are being let down collectively, time and time again, we grab on to the tiny silver of hope we can have.

How many times can you have your heart broken? I ask myself this everyday. But I keep on trying anyway. I no longer even have time to feel like an impostor, because to be even in that position to ask that question is a luxury. The people in poverty do not wake up everyday to ask themselves if they are good enough for something, because every single decision they have to make will result in their families having enough to eat or not. I know that if I incessantly worry whether I am capable of doing the work, I am giving up precious energy to do the actual work instead.

I keep on trying, because I care deeply, and when you care this deeply, a lot of things cease to matter. It is like loving someone because you simply do, you do not love because it is tied to some condition tied to success. Maybe I don’t wish to admit this, but despite all the disappointment I have felt, the love I have for humanity is unconditional – because no amount of logic or rationality can explain why I keep on trying, despite being made to feel like having ideals is wrong in this world where we celebrate cannibalizing our own people economically, and yet holding that potentially misguided faith that one day, we could take that giant leap into a world where it is clearly evident that our survival is really dependent on each other, that doing well at the expense of others is not going to be sustainable.

January 11, 2015

finding balance

I’ve been unwell for the past two weekends. I’ve had one of my chronic migraines last weekend and this week, I’ve been having a headache with chills. Having chronic pain to me is worse than being outright sick like having a flu, because at least with a flu, you know it is going to go away eventually with the appropriate treatment. And it is not your fault that you are infected with a virus.

With chronic pain though, I start to wonder what went wrong and when. Was it my diet? Have I been thinking too much? Lack of exercise? Each time I try to do anything with my brain – think, read, write, all the favorite things I like to do, my pain and fatigue worsens.

I haven’t been sick for two weeks straight, in a very long while. It is making me ask myself some difficult questions. I have always been constitutionally weaker than the average person I would guess, in a different way. I don’t get colds or flus as much, but any shifts in my diet, sleep or environment will trigger something from a full spectrum of chronic issues.

I wonder if I have a finite unchangeable amount of energy I need to be careful of depleting, and if that means from now on I just have to be really picky about the things I choose to exert my energy on? I’ve just been reading a lot of research on chronic migraines, and apparently migraine sufferers have a different brain structure. It makes me wonder how much of it I can change, and how much of it is about learning how to cope.

It may mean that despite my obvious enjoyment and satisfaction from activities that require thinking, I may have to cut them down while I try to regain some balance to my health. It will take a lot of experimenting, and it may be possible that this can be something I cannot change, and therefore I need to decide where I want to focus my finite energy on.

I guess it is also a timely reminder that like everything else, life requires balance, and there’s perhaps no way I can get away with infinitely thinking without suffering any consequences. It is now time to incorporate less-thinking activities into my life – yoga, meditation, any suggestions?

December 21, 2014

an internal vacation

Everyone’s gone for the holidays. Last year I had a two week road trip, so this year I was wondering if I should be doing anything. I contemplated visiting San Diego, I haven’t been there, and traveling always brings me unexpected gifts.

But I’ve always had this fantasy of having all the time in the world to do all the things I never had time to do – read, learn, cook, code, write, whatever. The truth is I have a fear of missing out, but not the regular FOMO that people have, but rather, I fear missing out on some potential self that would exist if I don’t keep on searching. That is why I travel so much, it is a search for all the potential selves that exist.

I am exhausted from all the traveling I did this year, not just physically, but also mentally. The travels were catalysts to major life changes that resulted in several shifts in my life, both externally and internally. More about that in my upcoming end-of-year review posts.

So this year, I am going to take an internal vacation. I’m rediscovering the delight of consuming people’s work, and through that I get a peek into their hopes and imagination. That spurs my desire to create, because I want to participate in this beautiful collective consciousness we tend to take so much for granted. Yes, the world is ugly too, but we often don’t remember all the progress we’ve made, how far we’ve come along, how much work our ancestors have put in. I don’t have the answers to deal with the ugliness, for now I am choosing to consciously focus on the good – how can I be part of the good, how can I appreciate others for being good, how to make the world understand that being good is not “being nice”, it is the only sustainable way we can survive.

To have the time and space to freely consume and create, is a huge privilege I don’t want to ever take for granted. It is a theme that comes up a lot in my writing, because the seemingly mundane act of reading a book or trying to create anything requires us not to be in the constant threat of danger. We forget, how good clean water tastes, how great are hot showers, how magical it is to be reading a sequence of letters that conveys complex meaning.

I have spent too much of my life always trying to go somewhere, trying to do something, to find that elusive joy and meaning, only to realize the magic of life lies in having the capacity to notice the extraordinary in ordinary.

In other news, I’ve started a tinyletter. You would think I would have no words left in me after writing so frequently. I am not really sure what I am going to do with it yet, except there’s this desire to connect in a more personal manner with the people who have been with my writing and me for a while. I want to know who my people are, and I want to be your person too. It’ll probably be more of a dialogue, you could directly reply to me in my inbox, and perhaps we can wax lyrical about provocative socio-political theories.

December 14, 2014

the more I read

It is ironic how much I’ve evolved when it comes to goals, routines and habits. I remember so much of myself having an “artist temperament”, which loosely translates to “do anything I like at anytime”. If only they told me earlier that many of these artists had strict routines and practices.

I’ve written about some of my favorite habits, as well as the realization that I’ve to force myself to travel, all designed to overcome my lizard brain.

This year, I’ve set myself a goodreads reading challenge of 68 books, in an ambitious attempt to better my previous year’s goal of 50. Why? I know if I didn’t set myself a conscious goal, I’ll not prioritize reading among all the busyness in my life. I’m also trying to make up for all those years I’ve spent blindly living. Years I’ve hardly finished five books, much less 50. It also helps to realize that even if I tried really hard, there would still be a very finite number of books I can finish in my lifetime. Maybe not even 2000 books if I keep to a book a week for the rest of my life?

I’ve entered December with 22 books off my goal, so I did the next best thing. I picked books that were highly recommended but short. It was a great decision on hindsight, because I started reading books I might not have read otherwise.

Among them were “A room of one’s own”, “The awakening”, “Invisible cities”, “The lathe of heaven”, and “Too loud a solitude”. Books are like micro-worlds, like little travel experiences. The best ones not only bring you to another world, but they make your heart churn with their beautiful prose. They make you think, what sort of mind is capable of stringing words like they were never meant to exist otherwise?

The more I read, the more I yearn to read. For they remind me of all the other books I’m missing out on, the elasticity of the human mind, the worlds we could build, if only we give ourselves that time and space – to be, to create, to think. That books are evidence that we have a collective consciousness, that this consciousness will expand if everyone is free to share and access.

Imagine a world where we all hoard our knowledge, ideas and imagination?

December 8, 2014

On writing a lot

Isaac Asimov wrote almost 500 books before he passed on at 72. He wrote his third hundred books in only 69 months. That’s an average of 16 books a year:

“Writing is more fun than ever. The longer I write, the easier it gets.” — Isaac Asimov

I write a lot, more than the average person I would imagine. I went from publishing every Sunday, to writing my transitionary thoughts on my blog in between the remaining six days. I write so much, that a friend who used to read every piece I’ve written, told me she couldn’t keep up with me anymore.

It used to bother me a lot more, whether I was publishing too frequently. I didn’t want to dilute the messages that were important for me to carry. Sometimes I want to publish more personal, casual pieces, like my terrible poetry or prose, but I was worried if they would impact the ones that mattered more — such as this piece on solving first world problems or the piece I wrote yesterday on race, power and shaping the future.

Something shifted in me last week, it cumulated everything that happened to me this year.

For every piece I was not writing because I was writing too much, because there is always “next week”, I am taking for granted my mortality and my capacity to create.

The act of creation, is a privilege. To create, requires life, physical health, the co-ordination of our psyche and nervous system, relative financial stability, time, space, a lifetime of learning and consumption, previous generations of creators, the lives of our ancestors.

“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice” — Virginia Woolf, A room of one’s own

There are pieces I have written that demonstrated a good amount of resonance with the audience. Resonance with strung words, is one of the most intimate connections we can have with strangers. It still brings me great joy and serves as a powerful motivation for my writing.

Other pieces however, feels like they get thrown into a wall of eternal silence. I have been tortured by self-doubt — if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

But here’s the question I ask in return. Would I still write, if nobody is reading? Will you still do the work you do, if nothing gets seen? Will you still take the pictures you take, if nobody likes it on Instagram?

Vivian Maier didn’t even bother to develop most of her film. Van Gogh continued painting — 2,100 artworks, no less — among countless of others who carried on creating despite not being seen in their lifetimes.

They had to.

I write, because I have to. I want to stand for my thoughts and opinions, no matter how radical they may seem. I want to contribute to the discourse of this world, not to remain in fearful silence and wonder why the world hasn’t gotten better. I want to publish my terrible poetry, among all the other bits I write, because I want to exist as a human being, not just by the virtue of what I do in my professional life or by the political beliefs I hold. What matters is not whether I’m remembered currently or posthumously, but whether I’ve done my best to exist in my lifetime. I want to exist as fully as possible, even if I’m the only one who sees it.

I will keep on writing more, because an estimated 13,000 days left of my life isn’t really a whole lot, even if I wrote everyday for the rest of my life.

13,000, if I’m lucky.

“Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.” — Virginia Woolf, A room of one’s own

December 3, 2014

death transforms

I flew back into San Francisco yesterday, and people have been asking me how I’m doing. I tell them I don’t know.

All I know is that death inevitably changes us. Sometimes it takes looking at a body in a casket to understand how final death is. That finality has made me re-examine my own assumptions on how I want to live.

I haven’t fully processed my thoughts or emotions yet, and I am not sure if I ever will. But I want to capture a snapshot of my mind at this point in time:

I think at every moment in life we have a conscious choice – do we experience regret over the previous moment, or do we endeavor to make the present or future moment count?

My grandfather left my grandmother, so she became a single parent in her early 20s with my mom as her only child (think about being a single mom in those days). I think about everything that my grandmother had lived through in order to enable the life my mother has led, I think about everything they had to overcome in order for me to have an opportunity to own my hopes and struggles.

I think about the stories they had to be part of, for me to tell mine.

I can spend the next few months in grief and guilt, for all the time I couldn’t spend with them. Or I can make my own life count. And hopefully, by trying to make my life count, I get to help others make theirs count as well.

I’ve always known that the promise of death makes many other things look trivial in the grand scheme of things. This time, it took death to make me start comprehending what it means for an entire life to be lived and lost, relative to mine. I have lived most of my life with tons of insecurities and fear – while this year has been transformative in terms of self-empowerment, experiencing my grandmother’s passing while I’m 8,000 miles away took that to a whole new dimension.

It would have been terribly dishonorable to let myself get in the way of my life’s work, not only because of the struggles the women in my life had to go through, but because I have traded off my grandmother’s missing of her grandchild, in exchange for my self to feel alive.

It is something I will have to live with, and I want to make it worthwhile.