non-sparknotes storytime. so today i was just sitting there with my day of interspersed work, reading, and twitter, and it struck me that it's been over two years since i graduated. it's a weird feeling, because it feels like everything's changed and yet nothing has... https://twitter.com/MadMarx37/status/1265663093604069376

two years ago, there i was, graduating with no clue as to what i really wanted to do. but having been the confident, seems-to-have-things-figured-out kind, i never betrayed that, even to my closest friends. in hindsight, big mistake...

i didn't quite enjoy my ICT major because i spent four years of college already burnt out, good at and interested in everything but the one thing you're 'supposed to' be good at. i was decent at my major, much better at a interdisciplinary approach of tech and social science...

not confident enough to take a leap of faith into either. but the figured-out facade stuck. since i was no good at anything particularly 'productive', the only option that seemed to present was to turn some passion into a career. i was always interested in the storytelling...

ability of games, but not enough to actually be a designer, though i wrote a whole lot in college. but anyway, i convinced myself otherwise and did what i'd dreaded all four years of college - went home with no real clue as to what i was doing. this was a harrowing prospect...

because i had some differenced with my parents and didn't exactly enjoy being home. to my surprise i found that as i'd grown over the years, so had they, and there was hardly any friction anymore. days turned into weeks turned into months. i don't know whether the lack of...

progress was because of a lack of trying or because i feared facing 'the real world'. likely a mix of both. but this purposelessness grew as days faded into nights and nights into dawns outside my east-facing window. one good thing in hindsight is that i got a fair amount of...

reading done during this year. still nowhere near enough 'productivity', though. it was taxing when at times i'd realise that the 3 months - or 6 months - or a year - mark that i'd dreaded was around the corner, with no real direction. before that one year mark, though, something

wonderful happened - i met one of my closest friends who i'd known for about five years at that point but had always been in a different city and later on a different continent. one thing led to another and we were in a LDR. it just seemed like it was meant to be and plans for...

years to come were made. suddenly everything made sense, galvanised into a sense of purpose like never before. but anyway, the months from there would show me that sometimes what seems like it's meant to be is too good to be true, and my nihilistic skepticism about LDRs turned...

into a self-fulfilling prophecy. the break from that was so drastic that i lost the friend in addition to the partner, and it was hard to make sense of things for a while. i think this was the first time after a decade and a half that i just laid my head in my mum's lap and cried

so there i was, back to square one, with no purpose. i knew i didn't want to stay in the gamedev industry, because the mental and emotional toll, like any creative industry, was immense, and i honestly didn't think i'd ever enjoy any kind of work enough to justify running after..

a specific sort of work that's supposed to be perennially 'exciting'. so i bit the proverbial bullet and decided to finally jump back into IT (which at that point i regretted not having paid attention to in college in the first place). it took a lot of will to get out of the sunk

cost fallacy mindset, admit that i didn't want to actually do what i said i wanted to for a living, and start from scratch. but i did, and over the next few months, with some helpful friends and the sheer will to not live at home anymore, i ended up getting my current job that...

i enjoy, and give absolutely zero fucks about. zilch. it frees me to think of work as just one part of life that shouldn't define it, and to put it out of my mind as soon as i step out. i made a bunch of great friends in gurgaon through a reading circle of all places,...

the point is that it's never too late to burn your past life, start from scratch, and go out and live in the forest or something. but in all honesty having to rediscover a self-driven sense of purpose was hard but extremely worth it. i look forward to studying some weird shit...

like infosci and being even more of a quirky insufferable know-it-all than ever before, but for my own sake. (btw ya boy got into a bunch of unis and i'm sure i'll get into even more next year!) after this whole corona ordeal has settled down a little, obviously...

but sitting here at home back in the town where nothing ever happens, it struck me how everything about my life has in effect changed over the last two years, and yet so little has physically changed. still sit and read here at my bed late into the night, only to hear the...

chirping of the birds and look at the pink dawn peaking through my east-facing window. some evenings i go out to one of a couple of quiet locations with a friend, one of them this bridge that looks back at the town in the distance. sometimes i wonder how much this town that i...

didn't want to live in for long during my adult life has given me, and how much it has taken away. if you're still reading for some reason, you're welcome for the storytime i guess. anyway, what's the point of this thread? i dunno, what's the point of anything, really?