Back to R.AGE rant

I am frustrated with myself. I know this fact before I've even consciously acknowledged it, because my face is covered in angry red welts – a sign of the compulsive picking that takes over whenever I get stressed.

You know that feeling when you know you can do more, but end up not. Not doing better, not living up to expectations, not performing, just not.

The worst thing is when I see it in Ian’s face, or hear it in Ian’s tone, and I know he doesn’t mean to make me feel like the biggest failure ever whenever I forget to email the contestants about something important, or when I end up drafting some really bad copy, but he does. And I do. Feel like the world’s biggest failure.

 It was my second month at The Star when he passed me my first project: R.AGE Food Fight – the search for Malaysia’s next food celebrity. I don’t know why he passed the project to me – whether it was because I was new and had less on my plate than anyone else, or if it was because he honestly thought that I’d be up for the task – and maybe I’ll never know. But I know that I’m not.

I am, at best, a decent secretary, who occasionally forgets to do things like update our social media accounts, or keep everyone in the loop about a new update. So okay, I’m a shit secretary.

I am, I thought, an okay writer. All along I’d been hard pressed to live up to Ian’s standards, and all along I thought that I’d been doing okay. He tells me when I write up to par, and even when I impress him. Ever since I rejoined R.AGE, I haven’t heard a peep.

I feel like a girl who’s been told all her life that she’s pretty, so much that it becomes an addiction. My writing is my only source of validation; my only indicator of value. And just typing this down makes me feel sick. I always told myself that I’d never become that girl. But here we are: different shades, same color.

 The project is drawing to a close, and to that I feel equal parts relieved and mortified. I tell myself that everything that’s been done has been done, and that all I can do is do my best not to make the same mistakes again.

Will I get the project next year when we go to ASEAN? Probably not. And it’s probably for the best.  But for now I’m using this disappointment in myself as fuel for whatever I’m working on now. It’ll burn dirty, sure, but it’ll burn.

I’m not consciously trying to end this on a happy note here. It just happens to be one of those days where I’ve somehow found it in me to not collapse under the angst. I tell myself “I can do this” again and again, until I’ve done everything. And even then, everything’s not enough.

I’ve written down a list of the things that I should or shouldn’t do:

1. Don’t be complacent, Clarissa. That’s what got you to this slump remember? Complacency. Think you wrote a good story? Double check it. Get your friends to proofread it. I mean come on, it could be so much better, why are you getting lazy?

 2. CC everyone. You learned this the hard way. I can’t believe no one taught you how to do that in high school.

 3. Don’t blindly follow Ian’s suggestions just because you’ve put him on a pedestal and can’t get him down. That’s your problem. Always ask yourself if you can do better – do more. I mean seriously, do you want to end up rotting away your brain at 21?

 4. Make your work your life. I know you thought you could excel without doing it, but some people can and some people can’t. You can’t. And anyway, is it really that torturous to write, come up with ideas, and interview people for a living? It isn’t. Stop playing video games all the time.

 5. More like 4.1 but anyway, write even when it’s not for work. I shouldn’t have to tell you this. You’re better than that.

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My new job is depressing me (And I don't know what to do)

What do you do, when you can’t do what you love?

I’ll be honest. Not knowing what I wanted to do had never been a problem for me.

I was the asshole of a kid who sat at the back of the class in high school, reading Harry Potter and giving the teacher the my figurative bird whenever I passed a test.

Right, that was just me bragging.

But I was also the kid who scoffed at those who walked around our school’s annual education fair with a lost, glazed over look in their eyes. I smirked at – okay this is embarrassing – the kids who shrugged mirthlessly when asked what they were going to major in, or the kids who dropped out of A-levels because it “just wasn’t their thing”.

In my head, I was the one true straight arrow, headed exactly where I needed to be. In my last post I mentioned being a real little shit. See what I mean?

But now through the added lens of retrospect, I can see that all I was, was fucking lucky.

My parents brought me up reading Peter and Jane since I was 3. They sat me in front of a computer every night – my father an electrical engineer, and my mother a linguist – and made me write pages and pages of stuff (A story, a poem, a letter, 367 words of Hello Kitty, whatever).

Then there was the fact that it was writing I loved, and not anything else. Writing is an okay profession. It pays alright and no one will judge you because then they’d have to read your work first, and that takes more time than a lot of people are willing to give.  I know some children of doctors who would rather come out as gay or bisexual than as an aspiring artist or – EGAD – a musician. So yeah, that was another thing going for me.

A few months back, when I was still writing for The Star, I met up with a childhood friend of mine. He had a problem.

Said friend was studying accounting but his heart had left that field semesters ago. Now, he said, he felt like he was just passing time, trying not to kill himself fin the process, but that he couldn’t drop out because his parents were pinning too much on him becoming an accountant.

Already, that friend had ditched an exam and intentionally flunked another. My heart went out to him – hard not to, with 13 years of friendship under your belt – but there wasn’t much that I could do besides offering a hug (I’m a great hug giver. Sometimes, if I like you, I’ll even do it for free) and sending him off on his way by the end of the night.

Back then, I felt a cruel sense of relief. Thank god I wasn’t in that position. Except, fast forward 5 months give or take, and I am.

In a previous post I mentioned moving to real estate like it was no big deal. Only it wasn’t. Let’s be brutally honest: I’m in a field I previously had zero interest in, dealing with people who make money off the desperation and/or greed of others, earning money that I might – or might – not receive, with zero hands-on coaching and hardly anyone around my own age.

And here’s what I’ve learnt.

It’s taken a few bouts of chronic depression and a dash of suicidal tendencies, but I can say this at least:

If you’re not happy doing it, you’re probably not doing it well enough; and if you’re not doing it well enough, you’re probably not doing it often enough.  Life doesn’t care why you’re not getting any better, like that bitch of a boss you had, life just relies on results when doling out privilege or punishment.

People talk about “doing what you love”, like it’s some fucking easy thing to do – that’s what I thought, at least. But hardly anyone ever mentions loving what you do. So my first piece of advice is this: If there’s nothing you can do about it – and absolutely nothing – then just do it. Suck it up, strap it on (you’re not a whiny 14 year old anymore) and get the job done. In fact, get the job done so many times that you actually get good at it. In fact, be the best at whatever job you’re doing. Take pride at what you do. After all, you’re probably doing said thing more often than the average Joe. Average Joe knows nothing. Average Joe will flail and die without your advertise. Average Joe needs you.

My second bit of advice is this: If you already know what you’re good at, or if you find something you like doing quite a bit, don’t ever let go. And I’m writing this in the hopes that those who are still reading (you are? Really? Don’t you have a life or something?) will be just joining college and settling on a major.

So experiment. Do it as vast and as wide as you can until you latch onto something you find so enjoyable it’s practically self-indulgent.

Take writing for example: For a very, very long time, it never occurred to me that I could be good (or bad) at it, because being good was never a matter of import. I liked writing. It was for me. So for a lengthy period of time, I kept doing it because it made me happy. I also continued to make the same mistakes again and again until Ian took a look at one of my drafts and fainted, but the point is that I made it my calling. I’ve always believed that the best writers don’t just write. They bleed.

Some people indulge in making money. Hey, no judgement, that’s their thing. Some people like looking hot and using the patriarchy’s obsession with pretty things to fuel their career. Nothing wrong with that either. The world isn’t made out of solely doctors, or lawyers, or engineers, or architects. It’s made by a whole cacophony of people and passions. We need food to eat, and bricks to be laid, so by that line of logic, someone’s got to do it.

The problem is when we start glamorizing certain jobs and blacklisting others with Forbes top-earning listicles and reality tv shows. Like, just this week, during the BRATs Malacca camp, I met two 80-something women who were working in a tiny shop, cutting hair and sewing clothes and basically being awesome at life.

Whatever it is you decide to do, listen to me: If you find something that sends all your senses on overdrive, and find people that make you excited about life, then don’t ever let that go, even for a second. Because you never really know how valuable that is until you lose it. And to be honest, I’m really tired. I’m tired of feeling lost and I’m tired of feeling so tired. But most of all, I wish I could be as excited to be awake again.
           

Now I can't see the word SPA* the same way again.

*Hint: It stands for Sales and Purchase Agreement

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