Advice to 18 and 33 y.o me

 1. Learn to challenge yourself. Life means more when you live outside your comfort zone, and your limit is bigger than what you think it is.

2. Enjoy the process of everything. Through the happiness, the stress, the sadness, the rejections, learn to watch how you overcome and live through those experiences and how you grow up.

3. Always try to finish what you start! That is called GRIT, and you will always need it until your last breath in this earth.

4. Be aware of your own bias, especially those related to age, gender, race, education, occupation, financial, and religions. Chances are everyone is bias, unless they have lived in all 7 continents, 10+ countries, has been poor & rich, and is raised in a very open-minded environment.

5. Be kind and reflect on yourself before you judge someone else, because chances are everyone has their own ups and downs, which shape them into what they are right now. If life is easier to everyone of us, maybe we all could become better people.

6. Do what you want to, as long as it feels right, but try to think a bit about the risk. This is at least my recipe for not to regret for not doing whatever it was I decided not to do, or the opposite.

7. Don't be sacred to love and to open up. We're all made of bones, muscles, and blood. Even the worst people have hearts. Some need to mature to realize that what they do can impact someone else, and in this some, that includes you, Tania.

8. Last but maybe the most important for you, be kind to yourself. Love yourself as you want to be loved by others. Listen to yourself when you make mistakes and when someone has done you wrong; cheer and be proud of yourself when you achieve something. 

European Dream

I have never thought that I’m a good child. I always thought that I’m a child who rarely listen to what my parent said. When my mother told me not to move to Bandung to study my bachelor degree, I fought her with all my will. (Moreover, painfully, this is just one example out of many events that I’m not proud to tell). My dream has always been to live in North/ Western Europe someday. Why? Because my mother has always told me to live there since it’s a better place in overall compared to where I came from. She used to live in Netherland for roughly ten years. I was born there. She never really like living in the country where she had raised me for almost twenty-five years. So, I always thought that I have to go back there and take her to live with me.

Up until this morning, it has always been my goal, but then she told me that the situation has changed and since I have my family now and due to the recent refugee issue, living in Europe as an immigrant family would not be easy. It never occurred to me that I might have possibly sacrifice the future of my own family to meet my imaginary goal using my mother as an excuse. (Actually, not only my current family, my dream has indirectly affected some lives I have shared my past with until this second I’m writing this).

I have to admit that being reckless is one of my many weaknesses; a trait which I’m not sure if I can be honest and mention this in any of my future job application letters J. Yet on the other side, I also believe that by being impulsive has brought me to the life I live now, which for the last several hours I consider to trade with my lifelong goal. Irony it is.  If there is a better time to fix my “mistake”, it would be now or never. Being a not so bad researcher, I think I can finally spare my skill into making the decision that we need to take.

Random thoughts/ notes:

I just finished watching 신과함께, and it made me think about death. I have experienced in total three deaths of people that are relatively close to me, my father, my boyfriend, and mother of my boyfriend. Having this experience reminds me that death is near, that it could happen anytime to anyone around me including myself, and it could be out of sudden. I have readied myself with the thought of my mother’s death since I was in high school and for some times after that. I know I might sound crazy. I thought I was ready for it, but after watching this movie, I realize that I can never ever be ready with the idea of losing my beloved mom. Although we are separated by thousands of miles, I love her a lot. On this stage, I’m not even sure what am I doing here being so far from her, if this even worth it. It’s like, you have a woman/ man whom you really treasure and you want to propose with a diamond ring, but you don’t have the money yet to buy it.

PS: Sorry if this post is not about my friends, which I promised to write about in my previous post.