Relief

It is of course very unprofessional of me as a blogger to leave here untouched for almost another month now. Luckily we have 29 days for February this year and I get to catch the last train.

So what’s new? Plenty! This February has been such an eventful. Both my professional life and my personal life have added such strong flavour to my life. It was bitter, spicy and sour. I have been stressed into such an extent that I practically hated everything. And now I know why. I have so many expectations on so many things and when the bubbles burst I apparently can’t take it too well.

So the last bubble burst this morning. It was such a usual stressful morning and I was trying so hard to fill up my thesis. I was just moaning my less ideal life to a friend of mine and I realised that the last bubble just burst leaving no trace behind as if it was never there. There I was. Setting there finding all the expectations I had became past memory with only a pile of ‘what if..’ left. I thought I would be sad and pessimistic again like I always do. 

But I didn’t, surprisingly. I felt a relief, a long over due relief. Maybe with all the expectations gone, I felt that I then couldn’t get disappointed or upset by them anymore. So the burdens that I have been dragging along just faded into thin air. 

What bubbles did I have? I will tell one day. For now, I just feel great, calm and full of energy for the cleaning tomorrow in the local hospital. We are going to have a clean ward.

I AM Pessimistic

I thought what I wanted was so simple yet every step I took towards it was so difficult and the outcome was always less ideal or rather disappointing for many occasions. Being an atheist, I could only believe it was somewhat fate. Fate is, however, such a tricky idea. It is rather sarcastic for some atheists like me who believes no supreme power beyond our mind but think there is such matter as fate somewhere controls our uncontrollable existences. I too found it foolish and had endeavoured to actively challenge it but I was less convinced by the results of my efforts. Therefore I concluded that it must have been my expectations being so high that I ended up unsatisfied.

As a consequence, and also as a result of brought up by my father, I have grown this habit of picturing the worst outcomes of things all the time and getting myself repaired for such scenarios. In short, I am very realistic, although most of my friends disagree and crown me as pessimistic. In my defence, this is simply a form of self-protection mechanism. Equipping myself with imaginable least ideal consequences prevent me from being upset from less ideal results. A friend of mine once told me that all I was enjoying was the surprise given by the outcome of something, which at the end was proven better than I had expected. He might be right.

It is actually just a strong form of insecurity. It might be, in fact, caused by my strong desires of the best outcomes, which led to my disappointment and not being able to believe myself again. It does sound sad and it probably makes it sadder when I am, now, speaking of it out loud, not very proudly though. But of course I am not such a sad little thing in all respects. I am extremely confident about the utterly odd Neural Network online learning framework I proposed in my PhD research. Well, I am confident that it is odd enough, at the very least. So, the light of hope is there somewhere after all, and I will propose to my PhD thesis tomorrow. I’d have to get a ring tonight somewhere.

By the way, happy Chinese New year. It is going to a splendid year of rat.