Day 14: A picture of me last year and how I have changed [Closing 2018]

Another year has come and gone. It feels just like yesterday when I was gawking over the iconic Grand Central station after presenting my research proposal. Now, I am ready to embark on the last stage of my PhD, ready for new challenges in both my career and personal life as Heidy Cruz – Park. More on that later.

August 2017. Grand Central Station, NYC

One of the many difficult things about research is the need to fixate on the tiniest details when delivering outputs. Academics are known for our negligence to deadlines and working at a snail’s pace because our work requires very high attention to details. My supervisor once noticed when the caption font in my flow chart was Calibri instead of Arial in one of my powerpoint slides. Writing a manuscript is gruesome when you have more than two co-authors who scrutinize all your grammar mistakes and anything else that they are not happy about – down to the last bar chart color scheme. I wish I was making this up. I’ve been living my life like my PhD. I focus on the wrong things that happen in my day and beat myself up in trying to correct these mistakes. It’s insanely tiring to wake up every day so keen to do things right, diligently and happily only to end up lost and frustrated over some grammar comments that I received in my manuscript. I forgot the next most important thing. That one must not forget the big picture. Focus on the details but always think how they fit in the big picture.

I want my career's big picture to be filled with awareness, discovery, and advocacy. Whether it is inside a laboratory, in front of my computer working on my manuscript, in front of an audience inspiring students, I want to work until my last breath. I want to wake up on Mondays without complaints and clock out on Friday feeling satisfied, albeit exhausted, for another work week. I want a composed mind that does not dump work-related problems in my family home. I want to work diligently – doing my best in everything that I do, not because I need a raise or a promotion but simply because I aim to have a strong work ethic. I want to share my knowledge and learnings to people whether through a scientific publication or on Facebook. 

August 2018, LACMA

I lived this year for myself. Knowing that I will start a new chapter with my husband at the end of the year, I intentionally focused on myself and all the things that reminded me of my youth. I spent two months alone, with minimal contact with Jay, and indulged myself with everything that I wanted to do. I flew to California to see my father and my cousins. I relived my childhood – watched animes, re-read Harry Potter, binged on my favorite mangas, talked to my parents for hours, did my hair at 11pm like a conscious teenage girl. I cherished my past. I reminisced all my puppy loves and heartbreaks and how, thank God, I did not end up with any of them. I lived in the present knowing that in a few months, my life will change. I hoped for the future thinking that finally, after a long and winding journey, I will be spending the rest of my life with the love I fought so hard for.

I know that loving one person for the rest of my life is intentional, deliberate and at times, forced. The life that I am embarking on is not only a union of two people but two cultures and languages. No one knows whether our marriage is worth it in the end but I am sure that I will never regret giving my heart and choosing to fight for our love every single day. 

I choose to live full of love. I want to cherish my family – the family who gave me life and my new family who accepted and acknowledged me as a capable wife. I want to cultivate my friendship with my beautiful friends who flew miles to see me during my happiest day. With friends who sent their love and well-wishes even when we are miles apart. I want to love my work without the need for romanticized passion. I want to enjoy happy moments without the need to cling to them. I don’t want to worry about how I will feel when it’s over.

As always, it was a year filled with learnings. Among all the great things that happened to me this year, thank you 2018 for giving my greatest love. 

November 3, 2018. Seoul, Korea

Day 13: Someone I would want to switch lives with for one day and why

My generation has been going through adulting in social media. If there's one thing that Instagram has taught me, aside from tweaking my photos to achieve that perfect filter, is that people's lives are far different than what we perceive. So if I think deeply about it, there's really no other life that I wanna live other than what I have right now. But if only for a day, I would want to spend a day living like Amal Clooney. I have a lifelong fascination with brilliant, career-oriented and sympathetic women like Natalie Portman, Amal Clooney, and Emma Watson since I was young. I wanted to grow up like these women and now that I've grown up, it's a bit sad that I don't even have a quarter of their brilliance. Lol. I am always curious how these people start their day - do they wake up before everybody else, just like Bill Gates and Elon Musk? Do they have a mindful daily routine? Are they intentional even in the mundane? Do they also slack and waste time on social media like me? What makes it to their priority list? I'm also curious to know how they come up with big decisions. Do they spend 3 days being anxious over the outcomes or are they as elegant and graceful as they are perceived to be? 

I'm curious. 

Day 12: Favourite movies

I'm not going to rack my brains in identifying my favorite among the thousands of films that I've seen in my lifetime but here are some of the movies I saw in the last three months, most of which I watched in succession during my recent long-haul flight.

1. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
Like most girls, this is a sure pick-me-up for me. Whenever I want to watch something nice but couldn't find any good movie, I always choose Devil Wears Prada. Haha. It stars Meryl Streep, it's funny, there are really good clothes and makeup in every frame and Anne Hathaway is pretty. What's not to like?

2. Going in Style (2017)
Three old men, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and Alan Arkin, tried to rob a bank. You can't go wrong with a feel-good movie and a solid cast like this.

3. I, Daniel Blake (2016)
This is an independent British film, mostly a social commentary of the current flaws of the British welfare system and how it affects the needy in a domino-effect manner. Viewers from developing countries wish for welfare systems like this and so they might not be able to sympathize with the issues presented in the film. But overall, this movie leaves an uncomfortable after-taste as if you were asked to swallow a bitter reality. 

4. The Circle (2017)
Tom Hanks and Emma Watson. What can possibly go wrong?
Everything.

5. Snowpiercer (2013)
Well-made apocalyptic film - a unique concept, solid acting and fresh faces (at least for Western audiences) - from Bong Joon Ho.

6. Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)
The story felt like it was taken out from Wikipedia, meaning the movie showed what everybody knows about Queen and Freddie Mercury. But the beauty of the film was not in the story - it's the storytelling, execution, and quality that made it a treat for all the viewers. I left the cinema with a huge smile on my face and much love for Queen and their songs. What else should you ask for?

The Terminal

I just got off from a 14-hour flight, passed the very stressful immigration in LAX and so you can expect that I was looking the worse for wear. I was too oblivious to my surroundings, dreaming of a nice cold shower. I was sitting next to a lady and two men on an airport bus that would take us to the regional terminal. I didn't know the lady was sobbing until the older gentleman offered a handkerchief. She politely declined. After a few minutes, the younger man who turned out to be a pilot asked my seatmate if she's alright. We learned that she's trying to catch the soonest flight to Oregon because she had just learned that her father was literally hours away from dying and she might not make it on time. The lady offered a few more details. The doctors just started administering morphine and her father had been holding on for as long as he could. I didn't know how to respond to that kind of news from a stranger but I gotta give it to my seatmates for being compassionate and sensitive people. "I'm sure your father is holding on because he is waiting for you", the old man said. 

The lump in my throat wouldn't go away. It was a hot day in LA and I could use a drink but the line was really long in the one and only deli cafe in the regional airport. I had a small talk with the man in front of me. I told him I was off to San Francisco to meet my Dad. He asked if he lives in the US and I told him, no, but he reports to the CEO in Silicon Valley every quarter so this is a good time to visit the US and bond with him. It must've been hard being away from my family, he sympathized. I asked him back where he was off to and casually replied, "Texas. I'm also going there to meet my Dad, but it's because he is very ill at the moment." 

I was genuinely sorry to hear this. 

Life works in a funny way. I could have gone anywhere else. I thought of going to New Zealand, Japan, or the Philippines instead but I really wanted a quality father-daughter time and so I booked this trip. I was a bit apprehensive because I never really knew how to talk to my dad when it's just the two of us but, just hours before we met, life showed me that there are people, who can be sitting right next to me, who are literally chasing time to be with their fathers for the last time.

You see, every day we meet thousands of people who are going through different things in life and we won't ever find out. We are occupied by our own tribulations that we tend to forget this truth and that is completely understandable. But this is a powerful reminder to mindfully exercise my gratitude especially for very valuable human connections that I still have. For having good health and financial means to meet them even when I live miles away. For having the luxury of time to do so. And for all the many little things that I should have been grateful for a long time ago. 

Overcoming perfectionism

I can still remember the day I first went to my psychologist’s office for my first counseling session. I was feeling anxious. My brain had been overthinking for the last few months leading up to my counseling. I couldn’t sleep at night. I ruminated. I was agitated almost all the time. I poured all my frustrations to my trusted counselor, all in 50 minutes. And the first thing that she told me was most of my anxiety and other issues stem from my tendency to be a perfectionist.

"Perfectionism, in psychology, is a personality trait characterized by a person's striving for flawlessness and setting high-performance standards, accompanied by critical self-evaluations and concerns regarding others' evaluations."

My counselor described it as an overbearing mother who pushes me to be the best version of myself thinking that it’s for my own good. I benefit from my perfectionism by producing high-quality outputs, having very high attention to detail, and by actually reaching this point – the Ph.D. But like any overbearing mother (don’t shoot me), at some point, it becomes just that – overbearing. For the past year that I’ve been going for counseling, I always had some new struggles to share and every single one of it stems from my perfectionism. I try new approaches to at least manage it to a healthy level like practicing self-compassion and mindfulness. Some weeks, I succeed, some days I fail. 70% of the time, those failures were triggered by social media. That fucking Instagram.

**

I am part of the social media generation. My opinion on how it affected my personality is real inasmuch as I grew up with its progression. I was eleven when I first connected my Windows 2000 computer to the World Wide Web with a prepaid card, fourteen when I joined MySpace and Friendster, seventeen when I started blogging in Multiply. 2009 was when I finally didn’t have to cheat my birthday to join Facebook, and I was twenty when my inner artsy was awakened by Instagram. My generation joined the advent of these media-sharing platforms that aimed to “share lives and connect people”. It did the job. Moving out of the country at twenty-four, I will always be thankful for smartphones and online group chats for keeping my friendships and sanity intact in the process. But it seems like humans have a knack for exploiting everything that is harmless as they turned all these platforms as instruments to either 1) manipulate, 2) generate money, 3) promote perfection or 4) witch-hunt. Finally, at twenty-seven, I had a burnout from all of it. 

As an individual who started using social media to decompress from the real world, I became affected by how they are turning out to be manipulative and, in the end, transforming me. As a young woman earning a salary and wanting to improve myself, I got so excited by internet accounts with almost-perfect lives online. I got so obsessed with their perfect skin while wearing no makeup as per their captions. My perception of a beautiful and empowered woman changed by seeing these busy, career-oriented women purportedly juggling multiple roles in life flawlessly. Fresh out from a long-haul flight yet not a hair out of place, not a single pimple in sight, and still brimming with grace in their allegedly candid pictures. New mothers holding their firstborns, all looking like they came from a salon, not the delivery room. I followed most of them. A few years later, more and more perfect-looking women sprouted like mushrooms on Instagram. More and more twenty-something women joining the New York Fashion Week, with enviable clothes and magazine-worthy photos, when I couldn’t even afford one of their tiny bags. My curiosity turned to envy. I looked in the mirror and my inner monologue kept telling that my whole life needed to be more like them -- more graceful, more filtered, busier, prettier, and every bit of "more". So when life took a toll on my physical and mental health, aka all mental and skin issues from hell broke loose in Australia, I finally woke up to my senses. Social media is manipulating my perceptions. My life was okay. I didn’t need the harmful comparisons with these strangers. Social media is feeding my perfectionism.

These are real struggles of the social media generation. A pre-millennial can brush it off and offer the best solution: quit social media. By now, we can all agree that it is impossible. Until some miracle happens that would start the Great Internet Downfall, I don’t think I can ever quit. I have long accepted that I need to manage my perfectionism, stay online and shield myself from social media manipulations all at the same time. So I un-followed people that plant unkind thoughts. I regulate my internet consumption (or at least try to). I practice self-compassion. More importantly, I hope I won’t be any more complicit in portraying my life perfectly when it isn’t. I regret that my young, show-off and immature-self used social media as a highlight reel too many times. 

**

One of my newfound hobbies is people-watching. I see people of all ages, genders, and shapes walking past me. It's amazing how these people are oblivious to my presence as much as I am hyperaware of mine. Sure I may catch a pair of eyes or two, exchange some friendly smiles, but they don’t spend more than a split second, moreover scan me from head to toe, and count how many zits I have on my face. I see strangers, coworkers, and friends who have their own insecurities too. Imperfections. Dissatisfaction. But unless they point out some mole on their face that they are bothered about, or unless they speak about their struggle in speaking English, I will never notice a thing at all. I see them as humans with their own individualities. I realized that even I, a perfectionist individual with high attention to detail, don’t even see imperfections when I look at people – so then why do I have to do that to myself?