Life has been pretty rough these past months. And I’m not sure what it’s for anymore. The truth is, I’ve never really felt this lost and uncertain for a long time.
It started sometime in October, in the grey and rainy Vancouver days. Nothing was as exciting or glamorous as I thought it would’ve been. I thought it would be so cool to live together with my friend, and have a kitchen to cook my own meals. And even cooler was my computer engineering major—I was like a hacker working away on my computer, and also an electrical engineer, wiring up circuits on the breadboard. Yet I wasn’t expecting such a seemingly glorious road to be so rough. I was writing code every single day, even on Saturdays when I worked on software for a design team, and Sundays where I had to do hardware labs for the entire day. I felt suffocated, and whenever I had a bit of time, I jumped for the pleasures of Youtube or TV shows for an escape.
There were glimpses of Eureka and happiness, like the time during the winter break, where I had to finish up a school coding assignment. It felt wonderful being able to find bugs in the code and solve the numerous problems that arose. But it was also Christmas, and I was surrounded by my loving family, uncomparable to the cold and dark rainy days where I would sit by myself in my basement room, and eat some leftover meat and lettuce salad and stale bread.
So sometimes, I’m not sure if I’m meant for this software industry at all. Do I really like learning computer science? Or was I simply alluded to the sound of it; the culture and its portrayal?
It’s scary yet exciting having no one to tell me what to do with my life anymore. And so I’m only left on my own; me, living out the consequences or victories of my own decisions. I guess this is when I have to grow up.
I remember before I started university, I promised myself that I would never give up art. Because I knew how easily I gave up, but also how much I didn’t want to disappoint my younger self. I didn’t have the courage to pursue art right out of high school. It’s like the usual saying that artists either end up homeless, or famous after they die, or both. And then maybe I would’ve had to go against the opinions of my parents, and do something unconventional. Afterall, most of my friends were going to university. Plus, I was really good at math/physics, so wouldn’t art school be such a waste of my intelligence?
Yet on those grey and rainy October days, it is me who sits here, a sad shell of a programmer, wishing I could be drawing in another world. And I couldn’t believe it was me who chose this life.
