Becoming addicted to hard work

Unlike in the past where everything is somewhat performative, these days on top of my day job on Friday and Sunday, I have a class from 4:00 PM to 10:00 PM and prior that, I have some classes that I teach. On top of that, I still find 15 minutes to do aerobic exercise in between. It sounds pretty busy right? And strangely enough, I still get enough of sleep at around 2 AM to 8 AM which for adult, this is somewhat OK number. But it's not about that, I'd love to reflect on how things have changed a lot for me within 11 months.

Sometimes, I could not believe myself how things progressed. The first thing I did was training more of my mental toughness and build more tolerance for discomfort. It sucks having to confront your worst nightmare but the more I do it, the more it makes me want to do all the things I was afraid to do.

Through that, these past 10 months I have been confronting a lot of things that in the past, were just something I pushed in the back of my mind. I no longer afraid of being more controversial, opinionated or even trying things that seems quite impossible.

Today, I am looking back that despite all the tears I shed, humiliation, discomfort, I am still here and strangely feel even more positive than before. I will continue to do all the things that seems scary to me and prove that I can get past / through it.

Other than that, the biggest difference is patience. I used to have 0 patience and wanting to learn things fast. These days, I enjoyed the grueling process of understanding things, or earning money, or spending days without getting any customers. Through all that, I proved to myself that I am finally calm enough when faced with life's uncertainties and difficulties. I walked through a memory lane the other day and realized how I've never been so patient with things.

You know what? it doesn't matter how you consume content/youtube that teaches you to cultivate stuff like that. In the end, I realized, I just have to sit with the uncomfortable and that alone, I could only get after life humbles me down and that the only way to turn my life around was to sit with discomfort and face the hard things that comes with it.

These past 11 months my life looks like this

• I submitted a joint research paper on flooding, gender and recovery that made it into abstract presentation round (due to funding issue, I couldn't attend the conference).
• I went back to teaching and had a total 50 students.
• I had so many certifications that I never thought I'd even remotely interested in.
• I worked on an AI agent that got into top 300 in the global AI challenge in China.
• I went back to university despite some financial constraint.
• I finally have the courage to ask for help 😅
• I build a business and understand that I can't do everything by myself.
• I am closer to debt free!
• I found new family, new friends and new community through the church I attended.
• I got invited to weddings and stuff like that ( was never invited into anything in the past)
• I got a piercing hahaha and that something was painful as hell.
• I visited Papua and Papua New Guinea (lived there alone for quite sometime, made me realize that I can survive in any type of situations).
• I finally hit a publish on this https://yourhivearchive.netlify.app/ which might seem stupid idea but hey, I need that haha.

And through it all, I shed many tears and sometimes I don't know how things would work out. In the end, that only makes me stronger and wiser as a person.

See you around!