Los Angeles: 62° Showers
USC Royal Parking Structure
I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights”
—Maya Angelou
It’s a little cliche of me to pick this quote to start off a rainy day blog, but oh well- no one is stopping me.
To get back to the main point of this cutesy blog series, I can’t say that I have followed my routines any better since the last time that I updated (which is just over 30 hours ago). I consider today being slightly unique and warranting an exception: raining and having midterms and being the second day of pre-hell week for dance and all…
Despite my seeming lack of progress, I still feel that I have taken baby steps towards my goal. The improvement may not be immediately apparent, but I guess it’s still subtlety felt.
5:20 am wake up time
8 lectures typed up and neatly summarized for my Biology of the Brain Exam 3 cheat sheet
endured 48 minutes on stress and anxiety in a ZHS third floor lab room
marked all my unread emails
prepared for the spring semester course registration
made an academic advising appointment
felt conflicted about whether or not I should drop a certain course
bookmarked page 34 of Anna
finished 6 hours of dance
a total of 1437 calories burnt
3:20 am bed time
What is that thing above?–––It was my day.
Why did I feel prompted to list it all out?–––I have no clue.
Having all of these bullet points presented in front of me exposed how mediocre-ally productive I was today. First impression I had reading through it: is my schedule really that barren? However, upon second thought, I didn’t want to belittle all that I had finished today simply because I appeared on paper to be less productive than how I felt about other days in my schedule.
Maybe it was the rain, maybe it was the early wake up time, or maybe I was just in a great mood today, but the last 24 hours felt extremely fulfilling.
I went from feeling sick to my stomach to rolling around the parking lot floor laughing to crashing after the burst of energy my Celsius drink gave me wore off at 12:52 am.
I would for sure describe today as eventful. Horrendously draining even. But I could also definitely characterize it as engaging and joyous.
Trying to puzzle my scattered thoughts together into writing also put into perspective how college hasn’t been going the greatest for me recently, but it’s okay. Academics have been more difficult that I have expected, and it’s a serious adjustment trying to modify my studying style and tactics. The social aspect of college has also been chaotic. Pushing myself to go out and get to know new people constantly had me burnt out very early into the semester. Now, I have started to take my time with things, learning to balance different sectors of my life, and allowing myself to naturally find my group of people on campus rather than maintaining forced relations.
Upon the completion of today’s excerpt, I also came to what I believe is a surprising conclusion: I am not producing this series or posting my writing to get a response back from the world. In fact, I don’t really expect anyone to really read this unless I happen to harass my friends about it and promote this content on my social media (which I am no where near mentally prepared to do yet.). Honestly, this is simply a more flushed out and nuance medium for me to organize my thoughts, reflect and remember my day, and weirdly enough, talk out loud to myself (because I like to read out my writing as I am typing things up).
Well.. everyone it’s 3:06 in the morning, so I’m heading out.
Talk again soon.
Sheila Wang: Missed Call 11:23 am
USC Queens Courtyard
Things that happened today:
(1) Finding a non-scorching-hot bench near the USC music complex to lounge on because it’s 11:02, and it’s too early to even head over to practice (which is at 11:30) as a ‘diligently punctual’ member of the dance team.
(2) Stumbling upon Sheila’s post on her Instagram account dedicated to life updates and reflection-based writing (@sheilaaa_thoughts) as I was aimlessly scrolling through social media like the unsurprisingly typical, 21st century, phone-addicted teen that I am.
(3) Being unexpectedly inspired by the post’s caption, which focuses on adapting to college, upholding responsibilities, and keeping up with routines, to start this blog, rather than embracing bland social norms––double tapping to like Sheila’s content just to end up scrolling some ways later and commenting ‘OMG I’M IN LOVE’ on a random girl’s new belated halloweekend dump.
On a more serious note…
Thinking back on how approach my day-to-day tasks and also reflecting on my own relationship with starting and breaking routines, honestly, I’m kind of disappointed in myself…
I’ve always been the type of person to jump head-first into starting something new just to never see the end of it. You know that typical Gen-Z-er that makes their ADHD diagnoses their personality? Well- Yeah- That’s me.
I’m that girl that buys a paper planner and self care journal at the start of every school year just to finish the first 7 pages, and then shove it at the bottom of my drawer where it never sees the bright or day again (or until I experience another unprompted burst of energy as a result of my endless procrastination where I am unwisely driven to deep clean my entire room at the end of summer simply to find the booklet nearly untouched, but have no desire to reuse it for the new semester because for whatever reason it says 2018 instead on 2019, like it makes any difference in how devoted I am to finishing the 150 pages of nonsense).
Over the years, I have kept on starting new personal projects: making a gym schedule, setting alarms for daily tasks, planning weeks in advance on Google Calendar. Distinctly recognizing everything now, it all seemed up in my head––too unapproachable. I was trying to change everything all at once, and clearly, none of it was working, since I am still a blatant severe procrastinator, struggling to lose weight, and have failed to stick to the routines that I have set up for myself. (Although I struggle with my insecurities and wish to improve aspects of myself, I am actually quite confident and maintain a relatively health mental state.) Most of the time, none of my plans were in reality executed. They would either remain within my imagination or were limited to a couple sheets of paper. In fact, I would consider it a partial miracle if I stuck to my plans for over 8 days.
I don’t know if this is an experience unique to myself, or one shared by many others. And I fear that posting this blog will make my horrid sense of self-restraint and inability to practice delayed gratification humiliatingly public. I also firmly believe that in just 2 months I will find everything that I typed up for this section extremely cringe and embarrassing. Yet, I hold out hope that making my experience and my current reflections public will help me keep myself accountable in my actions.
Pushing down the publish button appears impossibly terrifying to me, but someone told me I should practice saying yes to everything I can, so here’s to my first ever blog post in 3… 2… 1…