Looking back at 2014
This has been a yearly ritual now.
2014 was the year I learned to be my self, for the lack of a better cliché. Finding my self was the easy part, truly being that self was the harder part.
In that process, I learned to spend my energy on what truly matters.
…and still would love, if a parallel universe existed and I stayed the same person. I have lived most of my life driven by love, or what was the ideal of love in my head. I wanted to be with people I love, and do the work I love.
I went to New York for the first time this year in April, and she made me discover who I really wanted to be.
It was not enough for me to do what I love, it was more important for me to be the person I had to be. Sometimes there’s an overlap between those two, other times it means letting go in order to do what we believe to be right. I don’t think war reporters love reporting in war zones, they are there because they have to.
It doesn’t make it easier. Letting go. It still haunts me once in a while, just like an old romance, but my life, needs to be lived with the regrets I can have.
Loving an entity, does not mean we have to be part of it.
My grandmother passed away
…just before Thanksgiving this year. I had thought it would break me more than I was already broken. Instead, it was like the final stamp I needed to live my life.
Somehow experiencing the finality of life — all the words we can no longer say, the feelings we wished to express, the gifts we did not give — I could have spent the aftermath regretting all the things I didn’t do, or I could resolve to do all the things I want to do.
Death gifted me a new perspective. It started to seem ridiculous that I was always waiting for people to let me be me. Why had I been giving people the power to determine who I am?
I had consistently used my own death as a motivation to overcome my fears, but it took someone else’s for that final push into that bright light.
Being part of the Stellar team
…was an unexpected twist. It has been exceptionally meaningful for me to interact with something that I have been trying to avoid most of my life — money.
I believed money is the root of all evil, I do not have an affinity to numbers, and the world of finance is everything I fundamentally dislike. I wanted to work on a cause when I left Medium. Education was at the top of my list, of all the causes I could have chosen to work on — finance, really?
Therein lies the problem. We avoid things we do not like, naturally. Yet avoiding something does not make it less broken. I will save more of my thoughts in another post, but being on this journey has opened up my world in so many unexpected ways.
My identity has been a running theme
…for the entire year, serving as the evolving foundation of all the change I had to undergo. It started as a crystallization of thoughts on my birthday, followed by a series of posts:
finally cumulating to:
Sometimes I feel like a broken record, but they were necessary as I tried to make sense of my self. The biggest takeaway? I can be whoever I want, don’t assume that I know who I am or who I will become, and that it is entirely okay to have multiple personalities, contradicting philosophies and shifts according to context.
Writing about issues I care about
…is very important to me, and they don’t get read as much. I write them anyway, it is not the number of people who read them, but rather who reads them, myself included. I write for my future self, so I can leave some breadcrumbs from my future self to my past self:
2014 is also the year I learned how to love.
I had put love in these tiny categories: romantic love, familial love, platonic love, only to experience a deluge of love that didn’t fall into those categories.
Sometimes, love exists simply as love. There is no why, when or how. Love was scarce to me, it was precious. I have now flipped entirely to the other side. Love is abundant, it shouldn’t be precious, it is everywhere if we choose to see it. We are just used to looking for it in specific places, having it delivered within a specific context.
Love should be given freely, and received freely. It cannot be truly free if it is precious. When we give it freely, having it returned no longer matters, because there’s always so much more to give and receive. This may be my biggest epiphany of the year.
Here’s what I wrote about love this year, and they are some of my all-time favorite posts till date:
I became a lot better with people
…this year. I developed several meaningful connections with people that popped up from unexpected places. I was a cynical, shy introvert, so the idea of meeting new people wasn’t too exciting to me, but now I am proud to call myself a people-loving introvert. I am no longer afraid to be around strangers, got better at showing people that I care and I dragged myself out more often to spend time with people. Yes, it is still a drag because I do not desire social interaction by default, but I am always better off in the end. The secret is to find more of my kind of people.
I am so very grateful to my people for putting up with me, and patiently inviting me out time after time despite my apparent lack of enthusiasm. Thanks ❤.
I stopped feeling both alone and lonely.
Everything above contributed to that process. In some way I will always feel like an outsider to humanity, but I have also learned that being an outsider does not equate to being alone.
All in, 2014 was a tremendous year for me.
I don’t think I was the same person in 2014 vs 2013. I had a lot of naivety removed, became a lot more pragmatic and rational, yet I have found optimism, ideals and renewed energy in other places.
Other notes:
- I introduced Stellar in front of 80ish data scientists at Datakind. It is a huge deal to me because previously I am not even comfortable talking to a group of five people I know, much less eighty I don’t.
- Did quite a bit of traveling. Arizona, New York (3x!), Seattle, Portland, Nicaragua, Seoul.
- Kept up my habit of publishing at least once a week, and resolved to write a lot more.
- On that note, started a tinyletter, have not sent out any yet, not sure what I’ll be sending, but it will be different from what I publicly publish.
- 2 books away from finishing my goodreads challenge of 68 books this year. 10 hours away, but I’m confident of accomplishing this.
- The post about my chronic depression was probably my most recommended Medium post of the year, though it were the notes people left me that meant the most.
- Reactionary emotions are not the same as sustainable emotions.
- I started to understand what it means to pick our battles. Or maybe to stop seeing them as battles.
- I stopped wanting to identifying as a designer. Or female. Or any gender, really. Possibly any narrow category humans like to define.
- The ability to create and consume is a privilege.
- I started to believe I can learn a whole lot of new things again. Because why not?
- Became much better at javascript frameworks out of the desire to prototype better. Still terrible, but better than the whole copy-paste-modify-not-understanding-any-shit-but-it works-thing I used to do.
- We learn what we believe we can learn, we become who we believe we can become. We have a lot or very little depending on what we believe. Change our minds, change ourselves, change the world.
- Similarly, don’t expect the world to change if we can’t change ourselves. Or other people to make the change on our behalf. This is our world.
- Don’t let anyone else tell us how to write our own stories. Even if it is the weirdest story ever that nobody reads.
- Will we still do what we do if nobody knows about it? This is my litmus test for everything I decide to do, for all the love I give, for all potential unkindness I may act upon. It is the opinion of myself that I ultimately want to live with.
Goodbye 2014, I’ll be writing another post to kickstart 2015 tomorrow.
Edit: here’s the one looking forward
