Patience is Overrated

Part. 17 Patience is Overrated

Patience is overrated, I used to firmly believe this. If I could do it faster, why should I take longer? If I can finish work in two hours, why should I sit there for eight. It didn’t make sense to me, why am I being punished for being productive and therefore was assigned more work? It would be unfair to the others, they say. Even if you finish you need to pretend that you are doing something, they say. No, we don’t have more work for you, sorry. Please don’t go do that one thing I didn't tell you to do. Actually thank you for doing that thing I didn't tell you to do. Do you want to run that scanning room / all the related people by yourself? No, your title is still an assistant, you literally joined six months ago. No it’s not just for all the makeup, costumes, special makeup, it’s also for all the props, no, both as big as the cart (轩辕坟妲己马车) and as small as the hairpin (同一场、妲己自刎那发钗）. Oh, please fly some drones over the exterior sets too, we need the size and details of that too, make it a stitched overview like a map. Thanks, you are the best. No, I can’t give you a raise, you joined six months ago.

I mean, I get it. All their reasons seemed quite reasonable. I guess I’m not reasonable. 

Because what is reasoning? I did take this class last year of college that was called “Decision Making and Judgement” under my psychology major. I enjoyed that class so much. I enjoyed all the classes included in the psychology program. I felt like a little kid in a candy shop, yet I never liked sweet things. All of this was stuff I was really curious about, but never had access to. I kept on taking more classes after fulfilling my major requirements, and just hid it under the disguise of “I partied too much, so gotta stay another year”. I was not ready to start using my knowledge yet, I wanted to keep gaining more knowledge. 

Logic, according to chatgpt, is “the study of reasoning—specifically, the rules that govern valid inference and sound argument. At its core, logic helps us figure out what conclusions follow from what assumptions”. But that’s not what I learned. The version I read in that class was that logic requires the elements of a pattern appearing at least three times, for anyone to form a sensible “reason”, what the pattern is, and why the pattern is the way it is. This means that I can’t understand anything that shows up in my life less than twice. But I guess I’m also exceptionally bad at finding out the patterns in certain areas of knowledge, such as human emotions, even if the same patterns have been around me for decades. 

I’m good at reasoning, but I’m bad at feeling. I’m good at sensing, but I’m bad at making sense of the senses. I’m sure I’m not the only one. We are talking about one of the most profound subjects of all time, human emotions. More on this later, as I’m still trying to form my opinions around that. The point is, I’m reasonable. They were not. They were being lazy, so I left. And I kept on leaving. I’m trying to settle, but still not sure how.

I’m not “reasonable”. No, I'm the most reasonable, if we are speaking of reasons, and reasoning for real. I’ve come to realize that people don’t reason, they succumb to their emotions. For a while, I didn't understand that. All emotions ever brought me were devastation, depression, and anxiety. Now I’ve learned to lean into those, I notice it does make life a lot more colorful. I used to always fall into this trap of understanding everything in theory and thinking I knew what it was. I didn’t. The people who do it, live through it do. Not me. I wanted to be like them too, I wanted to live through things too. Maybe I overdid it, maybe I’m still over doing it. But this is for me, just enough.

Part. 18 Enough

When I was in the mental hospital, we used to gather three times a day, to say these mantras to ourselves, because they believed that we were in there because we didn’t believe any of these.  The mantras go like this, “I’m safe. I’m loveable. I’m worthy. I’m good enough.” I used to think, what kind of bullshit is that, is this really going to help me? After a few times, I started crying every time I said it. By the time I left, I had convinced them that I was no longer needing to remind myself of those anymore. But I find myself still having to say these to myself even to this day. 

I seem to need a lot, nothing is ever enough. But also I seem to need very little, a bed, a room, and access to books are enough. But also freedom of self-expression, freedom of participating in politics, freedom of eating whatever I want whenever I want, freedom of going wherever whenever I want to, freedom of saying no, freedom of feeling safe, or not safe, a lot of these I think should be free for all rights. Somehow these are not free for all at all. This is strange to me. But most people seem to never have a problem with it, or even notice it. Or tell me I’m overthinking if I share, or tell me that I’m being ungrateful. 

Ungrateful for what? For having to self-exile to literally the furthest place from home? For not knowing if I’d be safe if I wasn’t politically well-connected? For being forced to play the game, all the time, regardless of how you feel about the game? I mean, shouldn’t you respect people’s decisions they make for themselves? 

So I left. I want to live.

Part. 19 Is Patience Overrated?

Like I said previously, I wanted to try everything after I finally got exposure to experiences I previously had no access to. I wanted to try to progress at everything fast, not because I had no patience, that was part of it, but not all of it. I wanted to progress as fast as I could in things I was curious about because I was not sure if I could live past 30. Going 30, in my mind, was the end of an era, an era of exploration, growth, experimentation, and learning. Now I’ve learned that’s far from the truth, being 31 going 32, I realize there’s still so much to the world we don’t know. I just learned a few days ago, our universe could likely be in a black hole. That would make sense considering how long our environment hasn’t changed, billions and billions of years. So long that we formed, life formed, we are typing on a machine, and we have AI. 

So patience is not overrated. If it wasn’t for the patience, we wouldn’t exist. I wouldn't be here, you wouldn't be on the other side, reading my thoughts. It’s a unique way of connecting, but it's still a way of connecting. 

After my dad came, I realized he quickly found his routines. He gets up, makes breakfast for him and us, goes for a walk around Lake Merritt, comes back, makes lunch, takes a nap, and goes on for a walk either at the lake or on the rooftop. Sometimes he goes on another walk to the rooftop while calling my mom on WeChat. My mom no longer texts me and calls me no matter where I am and what I’m doing to trigger me. I still don’t want to talk to her, I really don’t know what is left to say. My dad seems to still have a lot to say to her still though, sometimes I think, they are in love, they’ve always been. For what my mom has done to me, to him, he’s still by her side. My mom seems to be finally learning how to be a mom. I'm not sure if it’s too late. I’m keeping an open mind. 

I watch my dad do the same things at same times everyday, I wonder, what’s the appeal in having routines? Is there an appeal to it? I always hated routines, how can I predict at what time I’d be satisfied with whatever it is that I’m doing? I like to do something until I don’t want to do it anymore, then I take a break, until I want to do it again. I heard that’s because Libra is a wind sign. I don’t know what that means, but it does sound like I come and go, with no stability. 

I do have something to say about this though. I do have stability. I’ve been after the same things the whole time, I’ve been working toward the same things the whole time, I’ve been still going for what I’d like to do this whole time. I’m consistent. I am stable. What’s more stable than refusing to change your heart and lie to yourself, no I don’t want it anymore, it’s taking too long, there’s no hope, it’s time to give up, it’s time to grow up. 

I am all grown. I am 31, going 32. My brain has finished developing. I did wait until 26 to start using a decent amount of certain very safe substances. I can buy anything without question as long as I have the money. I am an adult. I am grown. Do you have to be called immature if you decide to not do what everyone else decides to do? What does everyone else end up doing? Whatever seems to be the easiest? Come on, you don’t expect me to believe your life is necessarily easier than mine, right? 

I don’t just believe that we were all dealt with cards of fate, we also follow the script of fate through our lives until our deaths. I always like to say, “I have no choice.” I do feel like I have no choice a lot of times, or should I say, all the time?

Part. 20 I Have No Choice

I have no choice. I always feel like I have no choice. For the first half of my life so far, I literally had no choice. For the second half so far, I have some choices, but still not much. Having a choice is a scarcity, I don’t think most people have choices. Or so they think. We all have another choice, if not many other choices. Yet somehow, most of what’s happened and is still happening to me does feel inevitable. From the starting point, at every single crossroad, I made the same choice, over and over again, and I’m still making the same choice, over and over again. 

I do have a choice, but I also don’t. I don’t have a choice when it comes to my obsession with things I want, maybe just one more try. It's not time to give up yet. I wonder if this is the gambler’s mindset, I know I’m certainly addicted. I have no problem with moving on to the next thing if I feel like, this is it, this is the furthest I can go, and that’s not good enough for me. That was the reason why I kept hopping from one thing to another, until there are a few vocations I do feel like I could exhaust my entire life learning and experimenting still to have new things to learn from. I have no choice, not to pursue them would be such a waste. Doesn’t YOLO stand for “you only live once”? I only live once, I want to do everything. I will create a condition for myself that I can do everything, or as many things as possible. 

I needed a way of making money that would allow me to have a flexible schedule for time and space to try different things. I couldn’t be bound to one location, one job, one routine for too long. I'd not be exposed to enough different possibilities for me to know what my vocation would be, if such a thing exists at all. This western idea of everyone having a vocation was very interesting to me, now I think I might have a few.