0 to 1 muscle
Insecurity is everywhere. Being jobless brings financial and career insecurity, and for some people, even life insecurity. Similarly, going through a breakup means embarking on a new phase of life with emotional insecurity. Why? Because joblessness and breakups are similar situations from different dimensions. They both show that all the things you have been building have collapsed. You need to start from zero.
That’s why, on an emotional level, it’s just fear. But today, fear isn’t the main character of the stage. I want to tell you the muscle that has grown on me from 0 in both career and relationship aspects.
Since setting up our daily standup and vision, our growth has been faster than we expected. My first technical project already has users and has hit the stretch goal for my OKR. One of my flatmates won a hackathon and has already built three projects. The other flatmate has a 60% response rate for her cold emails. Her newsletter has around 400 subscribers with a 30% open rate, and the numbers of subscribers keep growing. Seeing how fast they are growing and their success gives me new thoughts. “Hmm… I think I already can get into a small, uncool startup. I might even be able to train myself to be a great LLM engineer and land in a cool startup by the end of July. I might not even need to rush about finding a job now because I can learn and grow so fast. I don’t want a job to slow me down.”
That’s also why I decided not to attend the hackathon at the last moment. My personal growth had already shown me a different direction, and I realized that going to the Berkeley Hackathon no longer aligned with my goals.
I’ve realized that I no longer feel fearful every day. It’s not that the fear doesn’t exist, but rather that my learning is growing faster than how my fear grows. Nowadays, my only fear is that my flatmate wants me to work too much, which is quite real and funny.
The same applies to my breakup. Yesterday, during our road trip, I was amazed at how happy I felt being single. I feel so free!
The feeling of not wanting to return to a past is different from how I used to reason with myself. I would tell myself that it’s because the relationship would not work. But yesterday, I realized that I love my current life and the progress I’ve made so much that I want to continue living this way, rather than being trapped by the messiness of the past and seeing my efforts going nowhere. At least, not at this moment. I also started having new visions of how my ideal partner will look like. I realized that I had unconsciously grown the small muscle of existing independently.
Even though I still recognize that being alone without a partner in the world to support each others is scary, not knowing that I will be moving again in August and not knowing where the next place to stay is, is scary too. But when I gazed at the cars whizzing by on the adjacent highway, my heart danced with an unfamiliar lightness. With the wind at my back, I embrace this new velocity of my life, bypassing all the fear that has haunted me, starting to set me free.
This is the 26th post from my 30-day writing challenges. I was inspired by Tung Nguyen, a friend who is a famous blogger. He overcame the fear of creation through mass-producing blogs and eventually found his own niche audiences.
