A word can’t explain a life’s intricacies and delicacies by itself, but we people often desperately try to capture a moment just to get it as close to the true meaning we have to utter as possible.
On a day like this, I feel I have to do that too. I recently got a job at an IT company into which I hadn’t thought of myself tumbling, started learning a whole different thing from what I hadn’t expected; not because it is bad or less motivating, but because it’s sheerly overwhelming.
Trying to live with a baseline belief that if something is difficult there must be a benefit in the long run, I’m just trying not to get ahead of myself because otherwise, as always, I’ll end up being so frantic, worried and therefore restless just to get up to speed with the latest technology which is, as you can imagine, ever-growing.
So I took my chances if this writing would ever give me some sense of enlightenment over how I should organize myself, potentially enabling me to make sense of striking the balance. Yes, it is a balance that I’m trying to be on.
When thinking about how I spend my day, it revolves around work — getting up in the morning, studying algorithms for about half an hour, leaving for work exactly at nine, starting my work at ten, hunching over three monitors, trying to make a dent in the workload of my team as, at the moment, I am absolutely useless. Then I get off my work at around 7 or 8 depending on whether I would stay there longer for additional study. Although I take a good bit of break while I moderate a debate session once a week, it’s just, give or take, 2 hours or so for personal time, or is it?
Perhaps, a matter of perception; anyway while you are studying, working out, commuting and whatnot, you are technically alone. One may well argue that it’s not personal time as it is just functionally allocated and fixed ‘time load’ that you are to spend. With that said though, I’m not here to bicker about what’s the right attitude toward how we spend our time. I just DECIDE to perceive it as my personal time because that’s what I have. As self-satisfied as it may sound, it’s just one of these coping mechanisms I got to take every once in a while before sinking into depression.
Okay, enough delusion-like mental victory. With that “work-life balance”, I’m mulling over how I best use my time during this period. Should I sign up for an acting club that I have long been interested in? Or should I make a new hobby of eating some nice food after work? Well, not as tantalizing yet. My best bet, I figured, would start with focusing on things that may take my worries that would come to my life later on off my mind. First is as with many people, money; it’s just self-explanatory as I just started my career, hence no money in my pocket. And the second is, related to that, my actual skill sets that pertain to my work. As much as I love learning new stuff, I feel I become the least important if some works are thrown at me and I have not the slightest idea of how I should get it done.
My coworker often says I shouldn’t worry about that much because nobody at my work would expect me to be as great as my other team members as they all have experienced this time. That should relieve me of some stress, but at the end of the day, I want to be great — Not just great; I want to be the greatest version of myself day by day before my time. With that, I’m gonna make this period into where, when I look back on it in the future, to become critical juncture that I may remember as the most important.
