On wanting

As far back as my final years in elementary school, I have been out of touch with what I wanted. 

From an early age, I adopted a world view based upon the foundation that there is somehow a correct way and incorrect way of going about your life. As anyone, including myself at eight years old and myself at twenty three, could point out, this world view is flawed for many reasons, the primary one being that there is no universal correct way of living. Yet, still, both consciously and unconsciously, I strived to adhere to some intangible right answer to how I should be going about my life.

Decisions of all scale were fraught because of my inherent belief that even deciding where to eat would have some implication, however minor, on the very nature of my identity. In this case, it was someone who was flexible and had “good” taste in food.  It became easier to go along with the desires and wishes of other people because the path of least resistance seemed to lie in a place absent of my own choices. Instead of listening to what I wanted, I would listen to my own rationale and that of other people’s on how I could make the most optimal decisions. My family and friends would pick up on this, calling me indecisive or in nicer terms easy-going, and my boyfriend once frankly told me that I never really said what I wanted.

There were tangible external benefits to conducting my life this way. Growing up, I did well in school and rarely ever got into trouble. My parents did not micromanage me because of my performance and allowed me the freedom to hang out with friends and pursue various hobbies. When I was in college, this mindset helped me get a job early on and to be perceived as successful by my peers. This, in conjunction with the various sets of privileges I was afforded due to my parent’s financial stability, provided me with a means of receiving external validation that dictated my contentment with myself. It didn’t matter what I wanted or if I believed I was living how I wanted to live, as long as other people believed so.

As a consequence, I rarely had my own dreams. When I was four, I wanted to be a butterfly expert because I loved butterflies. When I was a little older, I wanted to be a doctor because I liked filling out forms and asking questions to my mom that my pediatrician would ask me. When I was in middle school, however, my “dream career” became less about my dreams and more  dictated by what was deemed practical and what other people thought I was best suited for. Though math was never my favorite subject, it came easier to me than my peers, and so I often voiced that I wanted to go into finance or business. In high school, I picked computer science as my major not because I had any particular passion for it, but because it seemed straightforward, both of my parents ardently supported it, and the fact that it could be applied to almost any field of study. In our work-centered American culture, career and identity seem to be inseparable, at least externally, and is a difficult matter for even those who are decisive and are determined in pursuing what they want at any given time. People teach you, albeit misguidedly, at a young age that not only should your career provide you with financial stability but also with happiness and fulfillment.

Therefore, from the age of sixteen to twenty, I convinced myself that any reservations I held towards computer science were not because I didn’t like it but because of imposter syndrome and the reality that I didn’t excel in it yet like many of my male peers who had started programming years before me. I frequently listened to speeches from notable women in technology, who advocated for increasing the number of women in the field. I read stories about these same women hoping to find a reason to love computer science in the same ways they did.

Not once during these years did I ask myself what I truly enjoyed. I invented stories that I sold myself on why I was where I was and why I was doing what I was doing. It became second nature to follow the path of other successful and well-respected peers and notable people I heard about in the news. When I heard that an on-campus consulting organization was extremely competitive, I spent considerable amounts of time practicing case interviews to get accepted in. When I heard an internship was incredibly well-regarded and well-sought after, I spent hours editing my application and asking for help. I was operating under some internal algorithm that the more people that wanted something, the more correct it was to want that same thing.

It wasn’t until I took an academic quarter to study abroad did my wants, at least career-wise, begin to surface to my conscious awareness. When I look back over the course of my time in school, I consider this one of the first moments in which I started unconsciously listening to what I sincerely wanted and enjoyed. In London, I was not surrounded by my peers in computer science. I spent most of my time instead with one of my best friends that I had made in my high school journalism class. Spending time away from the wants I had developed from other people felt at once destabilizing and liberating. When we sat in a small cafe in Porto during a school break abroad, I confessed to her that I realized that I had not been pursuing what I wanted, albeit only a few weeks after obsessing over some job application for a highly-competitive product management internship at a big name company. I told her that maybe I wanted to become a food studies professor instead, or an urban planner. When she asked if I had plans, I mentioned the surface research I had done in a midnight Googling frenzy about various university programs across the world under the realization that I only had a year and a half left in college.

I mention this moment not because of how it determined my career outcome after college but because of how it affected my mindset on my own life moving forward. After that conversation, I did not tend to the path of becoming an urban planner nor a food studies professor upon graduation for various reasons including the realization that I could not imagine myself in these professions after learning the realities of those fields from professors. I instead ended up where I had started near the beginning of college, returning as a software engineer at a company I had interned with for two years. Though I returned to the same place, this time, it was on my own terms. Somewhere between that rainy day in Porto and my first day of work, I became reacquainted with my love of writing through a spontaneous, last minute decision in the fall before I graduated to apply to a creative writing workshop because it would be fun and I missed writing like I did for my high school news magazine. I learned that having a job seemed to be a necessary requisite to being a writer, which as most people know, is not necessarily financially lucrative on its own, especially in the United States. As an unexpected consequence of this belief, I became increasingly appreciative of my job and wanted to produce quality engineering work so that I could continue to financially support my own journey with writing.

Through this reconciliation and redefinition of what work means to me, as well as years of regular sessions with various licensed therapists, I became more in touch with my own wants slowly. Though it seems, on the surface, that deciding your career and deciding what to eat or what to wear are entirely separate from one another, they are not. Underlying these choices are simply what one wants and doesn’t want. While I am learning to disentangle my self-worth with how other people perceive my job and my writing, I am simultaneously learning how to disentangle my self-worth from how people perceive the food I like, the clothes I wear, my humor, along with all the other microscopic components that comprise who I am and who I am becoming.

It is not an easy process. Most days, there is a bit of uncertainty that comes from trusting that what I want, or even how I feel, does not fall inside the binary of right and wrong. When I was younger, I used to write letters to my future self, wondering whether I would reach a place where I was happy with who I was and the people I was around. This is my letter back.