2011 has been a trying year for me for many reasons.
I started the year off slowly, languishing in the holiday mood for a bit too long, and I never felt like I really picked up much steam throughout the year. I always felt somewhat lazy during the first third of the year, rather wasting time playing games.
I think 2011 is also the only year where I’ve done nothing other than games and study. Every other year, I try to do something productive, like learn Jap, exercise, learn piano whatever. I can’t say I’ve learnt anything useful in 2011.
At the same time, 2011 was also a year of a lot of stress. Working on my thesis proved to be a very tough experience. Although there was a lot of freedom and a lot of time to work on it, the scope of it, and the uncertainty of my thesis topic, really kept me stressed up about it for most of the year. My mark for it was OK – supposedly on the ‘lower end of very good’. But with a thesis, you’re expected to get ‘very good’ anyway I think. Nor was thesis my only source of stress. Doing badly in Procedure papers really added to that sense of doom and fear I felt throughout the year. My final mark for that however turned out to be not bad.
And for that, I am somewhat grateful. That this year in general didn’t end up ‘bad’ in terms of results. That’s the kind of experience that can really wreck a holiday. Nevertheless, I found myself really resenting the whole uni experience around the middle of the year. I think I might have made a post about how much I hate law school actually.
2011 has also been good for another reason. Around late June, a Lorikeet joined our household. While “Sherbie” is a lot of work, I think she has brought everyone in the family a lot of joy with her antics.
I was also offered a job this year as well, in a firm that I really wanted to work in. That has been an incredible blessing for me, and it came as a much needed break from what seemed to be a constant stream of bad news throughout the year.
Relationship wise, I think 2011 has been a mixed year. On one hand, I’ve gone through some really trying times with my girlfriend. Yet on the other hand, I think we’ve really strengthened our relationship through these times. I don’t think we’ve managed to resolve a lot of the underlying issues in our relationship, but I feel somehow that we’ll be better able to deal with them in the future. Only time will tell how that’ll turn out though.
As I look back on 2011, and as I end the second last semester of my uni experience and contemplate my final year of freedom before work, I asked myself if I had grown to be a better person throughout these past 5 years. Looking back on my army days, it was easy to feel like I had changed a lot within the span of 2 years. In comparison, I don’t feel like I’m any closer to becoming the person I want to be after 5 years of uni. If anything, I feel disillusioned, and ready to close this chapter of my life behind me. But that doesn’t really have anything to do with whether I’ve become a better person.
One thought I’ve had which brings me closer to answering that question “am I a better person” is this idea that I lost my sense of who I wanted to be in the past 5 years. As you might be able to tell from my previous posts, for the past few years in uni, I’ve put a strong emphasis on achievements to define success in my life: do well in mooting, play starcraft 2 competitively, complete piano, learn guitar, run city 2 surf, do honours. The list goes on. But I’ve come to realise that these things have never really been things that I wanted to be. I wanted to be cool sure, and be able to do lots of things. But more importantly, since I was young, I’ve always wanted to be the kind of person who could walk upright, who would make the right decisions in life. The hero who would fight for the oppressed, who would not bend to corruption. But somehow along the way, I feel like I’ve lost sight of that. I feel like I’ve focused more on the means of getting there rather than the end itself. The end being in an important place in the world where I would need to make decisions that would affect those around me, the means being the power that would take me there.
This is only a thought for now. But I really want to get back to becoming the person that I want to be. Doing things like training myself for various achievements will be important for that process yes, but I must not lose sight of the ultimate goal, a goal which is still elusive, and still hard for me to define. As I say goodbye to 2011 and look forward to the holiday that will ease me into my final year of uni life, and youth life, I’m glad that I’ve at least come to an awareness that I want to be in life is not necessarily defined by my achievements. I look froward to getting back to finding that elusive goal in 2012.
