some more angsty musings (but long form!)

I've been putting off cleaning my room for two four weeks now, and these two four weeks were on top of the three weeks I spent graduating, "decompressing", and cavorting around the East Coast and Scandinavia. So currently, per usual, I am procrasti-blogging and about as decompressed as a bag of Lays on a flight en route to Copenhagen. 

The view from the Church of Our Savior (Copenhagen)

Aside from running, reading, working, and avoiding thoughts of the future, I've been feeling a little stagnant in the personality department as of late. Stagnant as in externally functional and acceptably amicable (if a bit on a quiet side), but internally lost, tired, and screaming about what the hell is going on. My hunch is that these are symptoms of living in the Bay Area, existing as a 21-year-old, or both.

After acknowledging my set of uncomfy emotions, my immediate reaction is to reflect on all the fortunate people and things that I have experienced in my relatively care-free life, and guiltily convince myself that while acknowledging sad and cynical thoughts is justified, I should move on and try my best to be a good human bean.

At least, that is the discount therapy approach I've taken for the past few years.  

We interrupt this programming with a view of some farmland witnessed during a train ride from Copenhagen to Stockholm, in which a kind lady sitting diagonal to me (and thus with a forward-facing seat) gave me a heads up when pretty scenery was about to pass by.

Anyways, a common theme of this blog is to conclude: "Well, I'm not really sure what I am doing, but if I try my best to be a good person, I suppose that's all I can really do."

Which is a bit of a cop-out coping mechanism in my own humble opinion about my own humble opinion. So, I will try to address the following questions in an attempt to move on with my life and regain some self-confidence and spunky can-do attitude that college seemed to have stomped out of me. Intermittently, I will add some vacation pics to remind myself that yes, I had fun.

i am a little afraid to google the symptoms of depression but this goggle-wearing shark convinced me to do so just now, and the NIMH tells me that while a few symptoms are there, i think i have good people around me and routines that help keep me energized and appreciative of life :) i also acknowledge that post-grad depression is a widely-experience phenomena, but in the off-chance someone on the internet is reading this, please get help and talk to someone if you are experiencing symptoms (or if you just want to talk to someone, which is a basic human necessity). it was not my intention to self-diagnose in an image caption, but after a quick consultation with a friend, we established that yeah a lot of people experience these feelings in some perverse "new normal", but we try to strike a balance in being open about sad thoughts without making it our personality.

0. Who are you?
Given a scrap of downtime, I'll turn into an over-thinker, but a self-aware one at least. I've been casually mentioning the topic of how to craft an identity outside of being a student to my post-grad peers, but most answers seem to reduce aptly to "it's a work in progress." Granted, I can probably attain a wider net of answers by reaching out to more people, but I honestly don't know too many older folks aside from my parents and people at my work (in which I feel asking the question "Help IDK what I'm doing in life" may not give the best impression to my manager. I'll have to workshop the wording a bit.)
Anyhow, I thereby employed the all-knowing source of how-tos (aka WikiHow), to figure out who I am. I was pleasantly surprised to see that I've done the prerequisites for self-actualization, namely writing down my thoughts (obviously) and setting some goals and priorities (see question 2 below). The remainder of the article is less-satisfying, ending on an airy "be patient and curious about yourself", with the latter suggestion clearly being the impetus for this article in the first place. 

Short of resolving to live, laugh, and love, I'll settle for some updated fun facts (!!!) about myself. I'll add a gentle reminder that fun is relative, and that there is already probably too much information about myself on the internet, so as a result these facts will be of the shallower variety. 

Me in some garden in Oslo, circa 2022. 

• Compared to my 16-year-old self in the "About Me" section of this blog, I:
• sadly can no longer read on moving vehicles without incurring nausea
• still see myself 44 years in the future in the companionship of at least one cat
• no longer have access to a bass clarinet
• don't talk about vincent 😶
• I do enjoy reading YA fantasy novels, webtoons, and occasional contemporary/historical fiction.
• My potential places of habitation are inconveniently dependent on access to Chinese vegetables.
• Some hobbies include biking around, visiting libraries, being self-conscious about enjoying playground swings in the presence of small children, and mocking hipster culture as penance for my hipster tendencies.
• As stated in previous blog posts, my favorite form of self-indulgence is writing blog posts about myself for absolutely no one to read. (hi julia!)

1.What are you doing?

It is currently 22:31 PM, and I was thinking about falling asleep to the delightful background commentary of Seaweed Brain: A Percy Jackson Podcast, as once does, but I figured I should finish writing this post before having to register for classes for the upcoming semester. 

I'm interning at a company that produces consumer electronics, and I am pleasantly surprised to see synergy between theoretical knowledge and practical skills gained from school, and the technical know-how from teammates who have experience engineering actual stuff. I am also slightly proud at enrolling in dental/vision insurance from my employer and utilizing those benefits, which tips the scale of job satisfaction in the opposite direction to my 35 mile commute.

Aside from work, I've been watching a lot of Iron Chef, much to the chagrin of my parents, who would rather watch me cook than watch me watch people cook. 

I'm slowly crafting a post-grad Kaitlyn, and it is not unlike drafting a DnD character sheet. Should I invest in +3 charisma to help me get through daily conversations, with a tradeoff of -2 in dexterity? Or should I shun our human desire to fit into society and pour all my stats into constitution to ride out the impending apocalypse... Someone back in college told me that to converse lightly with coworkers, it is handy to have a hobby to wax poetic on to show you have a life outside of circling back to key learnings.

I've designated biking as my non-shop talk of choice (note: this is not my bike). I was also talking to a friend about the distribution of DnD stats people would select if they could design their child on a character sheet, but then I got called a nerd :c 

2. What do you want?

As a bit of a late bloomer, I think my sentience as a human being really began around the age of 16, and grew exponentially upon entering college at 18. Prior to my awakening, I lived my life on a day-to-day basis, fulfilling the basic rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I existed innocently and ignorantly, and soaked up all the nutrients that my family and community afforded me without question. Accordingly, I never had to think too far ahead of what I actually wanted, as the subset of potential outcomes was constrained enough (at least in my mind) to the point where I figured I would bump into the opportunity at some point.

And then bam, I entered college and the subspace of potential outcomes multiplied, and bam the same thing happened after graduating undergrad. To once again use gaming analogies (as the non-gamer I am), I spent a lot of time investing in my stats and 'leveling up' to unlock new paths. But coupled with my self-inflicted need to justify my existence as a person (with I attribute to either astoundingly high or cripplingly low self-esteem -there is no happy medium), you can see how I was faced with decision anxiety. 

A subway station in Stockholm. Alt text: where does the escalator of life lead to *whoosh*

So what do I want? I want to be comfortable with myself individually, as well as a part of a larger society. The first 16-18 formative years of my life molded me from a blob of cells to a semi-independent, generally-functioning human being. Years 18-21 expanded the breath of people and paths I saw available, while honing the depth of skills that allow me to be employed. 

In anticipation of the next few years, I've always felt turmoil about the debate surrounding stability vs adventure, nobility of a cause vs a living wage. Why the two are always framed as diametrically opposed, I am not so sure, but I've another year to once again open up a few more paths in the career department before etching out some grand plans for myself.

But I want at least begin to narrow down what I think it means to be a decent human being, where my existence can have a net benefit on the world, while balancing it with the need to live for myself as well. 

My post is getting a bit ramble-y, but this blog post about 'Your Life in Weeks', helped put some things into perspective. Our time on Earth is neither infinite nor instantaneous. Faced with my mortality in the form of a grid of blank squares, I feel at the age of 21 that I'm on a decent pace -neither accelerated nor (thankfully) cut short. And there are a lot of future squares to live through as well, with their blankness being both nerve-wracking to my choice paralysis and enticing to my fear of stagnancy. 

To finally end all this wooshy pondering, I'll just commit some tangible goals down here in no particular order: 

A list of some potential aspirations of varying effort:

- record a podcast episode (topic TBD)

- drive a stick shift car

- become a teacher

- get good at being an engineer

- camp!

A clean room is in sight eventually q.q