Being lost in the darkness of my life
Having to do what you are not enjoy everyday is a nightmare. Not knowing what you enjoy is even worse. How do I get myself out of the darkness without knowing what I truly want?
Since I was a kid, I was always told to become an engineer. Being raised in a family where my father had won multiple scholarships, achieved various academic goals, the pressure to be as successful weighted on the shoulders of a kid who had not yet found his passion. My father used to push me a lot, to get into good school and to have good grades so that we can be proud to our relatives and people we know. Little that he knows, because of that, I spent too much time on my study, from 7AM until 9PM everyday, with a slightly shorter period on Sunday that I didn’t have enough time to think about what my passion is or what I want to pursue. All of the time in my middle school and high school were spent on how to get good grades in Maths and other subjects.
I came to the US when I was 16 for college, not knowing which path I should go. All of the expectations and the lesson from my parents were: “you are good at Maths (I’m not…Not Genius good), you should choose a career based on your strengths such as Engineering or Science”. Although I do love Science, it is a very broad field in which I hadn’t known which field I wanted to follow at that time yet. I chose Mechanical Engineering to study after 3 months setting foot on the American soil. After that, I started to do what I knew best, to study and try to get good grades. In my senior year, I started to realize that I was not an Engineering person. My friends around me had a passion for Engineering. They joined clubs, built things that I am too lazy to get involved in. Put this in a different way, my characteristics are not suited to become an engineer. I don’t have an Engineer way of thinking.
Fast forward to my first job, I was grateful to have my current employer reach out to me after more than 2 months searching for a job. Being joyful, I started my job as an engineer with the mindset of trying my best to contribute to the group and to convince myself that I had finally found my career. The workplace was nice. My co-workers are nice and they always try to help me since I joined the team. I learned a lot of valuable lessons from them, mostly on how to deal with people and how to deal with situations in life. Everything was good until February this year. Since the pandemic struck America and changed everything, I had to work from home. When I started to work from home, I had more time to myself than what I used to have in the office. And this was when everything started to change.
I started to question my choice since then. Do I enjoy what I am doing right now? Do I want to follow this path for the rest of my life? What is it that I am truly desired? I started to try something new. I taught myself how to code and for a brief moment in a span of a month I thought I had found my true passion. I spent hours after work, usually until 10 in the evening trying to decode a bug in my work, asking others on coding forums how to approach an issue and watching tutorial videos. I loved coding. Or did I? After successfully published my first apps on Apple App Store, the fire in me suddenly disappeared. I quickly realized that coding is not my passion but rather something temporary new that I want to conquer.
For the next few months, I lived my life completely lossless. I didn’t know what to do or where I would be in my life. I could not quit my job and I had not found my passion either. I spend countless hours lying on my bed after work, thinking about my plan in the future, and where I should pursue to regain my joy in life. Everything is in the dark right now and I cannot find a way out. At this moment, I am sitting on my desk, typing my story, sharing with all of you with the hope that the thing that I love, the career that I truly desired will come to drag me out of this darkness and give me purpose to keep moving forward.
