Reflection

Some time’s passed since the last post.

I spent a few hours trying to gather my thoughts, but I don’t think I ever did. I wrote down some notes, trying to make sense of what I was feeling and why, but just ended up deleting everything and putting up the post that is up today.

That’s okay, I’m happy with what came out. I promised to myself I wouldn’t delete any blog posts I made here, so I wanted to make sure I meant every word. I felt like sharing some of the thoughts I left behind that day, and what’s been like since then.

I wrote this on my journal that day

“I wanted to feel love, and I wasn’t feeling any love.”

Some of you know that I nearly went homeless this year. It affected me a lot mentally, and it made me want to take a step back and reconsider the things I actually value in life.

I took a ferry to Bainsbridge, let myself get kidnapped by a hippie lesbian couple in Cap Hill, I went to my first pop up concert here in Seattle, I almost drowned thinking I remembered how to swim. By the end of it all, I was able to get my footing. I was broke, I didn’t have those friends I made and I didn’t even feel like going back to those places. But rent was paid, and for some reason I was happier than ever. In a way I think it felt like I had regained my humanity.

Besides that, I also started considering different ways to go about my day to day life. Particularly, I started making big changes to the way I interact with technology. I was very inspired by the works of 100 rabbits. I was very delighted to hear how they learned from their experiences and developed a way to do computing that was healthy, permutable and so artistic. I wanted to see what it was like. I tried using operating systems that didn’t have access to browsers, I answered an email from kmscon, I wrote a lot of C, it was great.

I didn’t really feel like going back to a normal computer, but I wanted to talk to my friends. As I paid attention to how I felt over the next days though, I realized I wasn’t happy with the sacrifice I was making, and it made me reconsider if I was even cared for in the groups I was in, or by the people I talked to.

That root question was what made me write that post, and when I wrote those words in my journal on that first day, I even shed a few tears.

Come the reflection days though, the more I think about it, I don’t think it was really that serious. If I hadn’t had that autistic epiphany and started enjoying minimalist UNIX software more than talking to my friends I probably wouldn’t have done anything about my friends. Maybe I would’ve started to look for more friends IRL and that’s it. But alas, I did, and I think it has ultimately benefited me, in that I’ve discovered a niche within my hobby, posibly career that I’m really passionate about, and I’m learning and putting a lot more work because of it. And of course, everything I said in the original post is still true. I’m juggling school, a job and this hobby of mine at the same time so trying to stay off social media does help a lot.

So I wanna be fully transparent, and say that though I feel like I’ve fleshed out the feelings that made me want to take that break in the first place, I don’t really want to go back to (enter centralized server communication app that we were using). They take the power out of me to make them as quiet and as distraction-free as I’d want them to be. If you want to talk to me, email is always there.

And thanks to everyone who’s sent me emails. It makes me feel cared for, and loved whenever I read something you sent & I wholeheartedly enjoy writing back to all of you.

I don’t have any shiny new projects I want to show off, so in light of that, I’ve decided to replace the projects part of this site with something else, you should check it out.

I want to finish off by saying I feel really happy with my current situation. I got an email this morning saying my scholarship was approved, so I’m also really excited about that. I think I’m starting to be myself again, where I left off at some point in the last few years.