It is sort of a strange thing to realise that a year has passed on by once again. This is the second year that I am spending in Singapore after my undergraduate stint, and to a large degree it would seem to be the case that I have more or less fallen into the pattern of life here once again, this time from the perspective of the part-time student who doubles as a full-time researcher. Life is not great, but it is still manageable, with careful prioritisation of the activities that I might want to engage in considering the limited amount of time I have and the limited amount of energy I can bring about to get things done.
It's a truly strange season though, this time of the year. I believe that I was probably feeling something similar at this time of the year last year, but at a level that is probably a couple of magnitudes lower now than in the past, since, to be fair, I was in a rather heartbroken state last time, whereas for now, I'm just in a generally disaffected type of emotion. I'm slowly training myself to not worry about all the things that make me sad/depressed, but like always, the theory is often easier to come up with than the practical implementation of the ideas that surround the issue.
It is not that I have given up completely on love, but that I have come to the rather unsettling conclusion that it is not the right time now. The conclusion is unsettling because on the one hand I might actually try to convince myself that the whole business of love and relationships should not be pursued during this rather limited time period that I am facing, but on the other hand, my emotions seem to be doing anything but. No, I've not fallen in love with anyone just yet, having learnt my lesson about the pitfalls of ``falling'' in love, but there's always this missing feeling of some sort that is within me, as though all the activities that I have been engaged in are not doing anything that is helping me keep my mind away from all these things that keep creeping up on me. I'm not really sure how best to describe the entire circumstance, but this is probably the best way that I can say about things for now.
Life seems to always be a consistent uphill struggle for me, or at least, it seems to be the case. Most people are probably happy to get by with whatever job they could get their hands on with the degree/diploma that they might have, but somehow that doesn't seem to be the optimising function that I'm running on---again we find that I'm taking the path of most resistance, and in many ways, am suffering greatly from the choice. It's not so much that things are impossible to handle (that's simply untrue), but that there's just so much of it that everything adds up really quickly. Time commitment issues are among the worst---at this stage, I'm probably overcommitted in time by at least 40% over what I'm supposed to be working, and there is no such thing as an over-time pay that can be claimed. It's a very tiring thing to keep running forwards at full power all the time, losing sleep and other implements that may actually make the job easier in the long run. Am I just a whiney person on this regard? I wouldn't think so, because I have all the evidence to show otherwise.
*sigh*
I'm not exactly bitter over things now, but I'm really just disappointed with myself; I keep having the feeling that I am unable to put in my best in all the things that I have gotten involved with in one way or another, and that feeling of disappointment is probably more depressing than the fact that I am committing to nearly 140% of my 47-hour work week. Being disappointed in the self is much worse than anything else in the world for the simple reason that it impinges on a very fundamental aspect of the ego: the self-confidence.
Self-confidence is a self-reinforcing concept/property of every normal person. If you do something that you are confident of doing and succeed, your confidence in the matter will increase. Conversely, if you are not confident of doing something and you have failed, then your confidence would have shattered. But in the case where you just keep getting hit with failures to meet one's expectations, there will come a point in time where the self-confidence just keeps reeling back from the high levels of negative reinforcement that one was indeed incapable in some sense of the word.
I just hope that my self-confidence hasn't taken such a blow yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment