I don’t know about you but this year has personally been the most reflective, anxious, and uncomfortable one yet. If I think back to last January, I expected a lot of things to happen: I’d have an awesome final semester of college, graduate, travel during summer, move to California to start a new job, and ultimately progress into a new chapter of life.
While the major things still happened like graduating college and starting a new job, having COVID as the backdrop of such events has obviously been really unexpected.
Each month of this year contained some notable events. They constantly reshuffled my priorities and expectations, while teaching me so much about myself that I probably wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
In January, I was busy between work, classes, and preparing for TechTogether Boston — an event I’m so happy and grateful to have been a part of organizing for the second time around. At any given point during the weekend of TechTogether, I’d estimate there were 700–800 people physically present at Agganis Arena. Now, existing in such a crowd of that size seems unimaginable for the next year or two. I’m glad to have helped organize TechTogether because it gave me access to many of the wonderful people in my life. Seeing hundreds of young people working on their professional goals and learning together in a single space as a result of your team’s hard work over the course of a year is one of the most rewarding things I’ve been fortunate to be part of.
In February, I was studying a lot and pretty busy but looking forward to spring break, which started during the last week of the month. I’m so thankful to have gone on that trip to Spain & Portugal.
March crosses over with the notable events of February since for the entire first week I was in Europe on spring break. It was one of the best weeks of my life and looking back at pictures from that trip helps remind me that there are a lot of exciting things out there in the world to see and explore, and this is only the beginning! But March is also the time when we were told to leave campus and return home since Covid was picking up during the middle of the month. This abrupt ending to college was something that none of us were ready for, and really hits you like a sack of bricks.
April was associated with a lot of sadness regarding the state of the world and trying to figure out a new routine at home. I think it takes about a month for me to incorporate new elements of routine in my day-to-day life, and this entire month consisted of me trying to figure that out for myself, while wrapping up my last two courses. I went on a lot of walks with my friend, watched a lot of TV, face-timed a lot of friends, and tried to find meaningful ways to pass time while trying to understand what Covid was doing to the world. My friend and I often joked like we were regressing to our high-school selves, but it was actually so nice because we got to catch each other up on the past four years of our lives and reconnect in many ways. She’s my neighbor, so I can wholeheartedly say that having someone you can text almost every single day with a “walk at 5?” message is quite nice.
The main notable thing I can associate May with is graduating from college. Although in the most anticlimactic way possible. Finishing a four-year chapter of your life with a diploma arriving in the mail is not an ideal way to celebrate an accomplishment like graduating from university. I had to repeatedly remind myself during that month of the main things I’m thankful for in the world. I had a safe home, loving parents, good physical health, plentiful nature and scenery around me, amazing friends, a full-time job awaiting me, and about 3 months beforehand to utilize my time however I wished. Not a lot of people had these things, and it was important for me to remind myself of these and use them to ground myself whenever I was feeling especially lonely, annoyed, or ungrateful.
In June, I spent most of my time pursuing a hobby I didn’t even know was missing from my life — creating digital drawings on Adobe Illustrator. An art professor from one of my freshman art classes taught me how to do this, but if you’re a CS major like me with a ton of self-doubt it’s not easy to make time for such activities during the ups and downs of college. So now, since I had nothing but time on my side, I used this period to go full-swing into illustrating various images I liked and also creating several drawings of my friends. This was such a great distraction from Covid, and it was relaxing to spend many hours of my days creating shapes and experimenting with colors and object layering. Another thing that helped me stay sane in June was starting a part-time project at mabl. It gave me an avenue to direct a significant amount of time and energy each week, and I’m thankful for that opportunity.
Another creative endeavor I started in June is letter-writing. I love receiving snail mail but never really thought about making an activity out of it until chatting with a few friends who said they were down to pen-pal. Since then, I’ve probably written 70–80 letters — some to friends, some to anonymous folks and initiatives like More Love Letters, and some to the isolated elderly folks living at nursing homes during quarantine. I’m lucky to have insanely creative friends so I spent several afternoons from June onwards finding my mailbox full of cute, colorful mail. Snail mail has been a really nice and mindful way of staying genuinely connected with my friends, some of whom live across the country!
In July, I finished my part-time work in a very personally satisfying way. Working at an early-stage startup on and off over a period of two years on a variety of projects makes me proud, and I know I’ve gained a lot from those experiences and the people I’ve had the privilege to get to know. It makes me want to join more early-stage companies in the future, and stay with them for enough time to experience the growth journey while creating a meaningful impact on end-users.
I also started my full-time job at the end of July. I never expected to have to start my job remotely from my house, but given that the company plans to operate this way till September ’21, it’s become something to embrace.
In August, Hurricane Isaias hit the Northeast part of the US very badly, and left most of my town without power for almost a week. In all my years of living in this country, I’ve never experienced a power outage for so long, and it was definitely an interesting experience. The main bothersome thing about it was that I had just started work one week prior, so going offline for periods of the week felt unacceptable. I had to remind myself that again, these are very unprecedented times and that I work at a very reasonable and supportive company. So it’s okay to take some time to focus on what’s important and let go of all my “new employee” worries of making a good impression. My manager and our team had been incredibly understanding so in the end, it wasn’t really something I needed to worry about.
I associate September with really picking things up at work. I’ve spent the past two years working on product teams in the dev-ops space (both mabl & Stackdriver mainly serve the dev-ops communities) so coming to Chrome was and is a huge learning curve. Working for the organization that builds, designs, and develops the browser I use every single day is inspiring. I feel like I’m learning something new every single day, and perhaps it’s the quarantine in me speaking but I’m very thankful for the opportunity to work on this team at this company. It’s also fascinating to learn about the inner workings of the tools, processes, and endless coordination that must occur in order to bring devices like Chromebooks to the market.
Looking back, I actually can’t distinguish between October and November too much. I joined a couple of secret Santa exchanges during this time which was exciting. The end of November was nice because I dragged my family to New York City for the first time since the pandemic, to walk around Brooklyn Bridge. This was such a nice step out of my usual locational bubble, but the city definitely had a different vibe. This year I’ve spent a lot of time driving and getting better at it, which I’m thankful to have improved at (to the point of semi-confidently driving to/from Manhattan).
Other than this, I’ve been pretty invested in work, and trying to navigate new types of situations. Working remotely has so many nuances, I could probably write a whole spiel on that. Anyways, in my opinion, fall is prime baking season so every other weekend I’ve tried to make some new baked good or sweet including a pretty bomb apple pie around Thanksgiving.
December has been pretty hard, and it’s not even over. Up until this point, it was possible to spend almost every other day going outside for a walk or some excursion or the other, but it’s hard to find that motivation when it gets dark at 4 pm and the weather is sub-30 degrees. Folks at my work have been planning a lot for 2021, and it’s hard to create that forward-thinking mindset when everything is so uncertain, but I’m hopeful that there are several positive things coming. We have promising vaccines for Covid being administered as of this week, and a new presidential elect entering the office in January. I also hope to be able to move to California next year and start working with my team in person.
If you’ve made it this far: thanks for sticking with me and reading!
All in all, this year has been full of surprises and curveballs. The BLM movement has really picked up and become something that I’ve invested my energy into, hopefully for the long term as I continually learn more and more about these systemic problems and work on confronting my own biases.
I think (read: hope) I have become a more compassionate, self-aware and emotionally aware person. I’ve learned a lot about how to exist alone, the types of activities and routines that help me, and how to practice self-care. How to stay motivated in the most demotivating times. How to ground myself and find joy in the simple things. How to pick up the phone and call someone up more often. How to create more meaningful connections with people.
This year I got to do a lot of the things that “I don’t have the time for”. This includes things like reading books (Sapiens and The Silent Patient are probably my favorite reads of the year), playing my piano more frequently, and cooking/baking often.
Something I’ve been learning is that life is really all about mindset and perspective. The notion of counting your blessings is important, especially this year. There are often many ways to frame a situation, and sometimes that’s necessary in order to stay optimistic! Focus on the positive, celebrate the small wins, feel the negatives, but use them as motivation to do better for yourself and others.
Fingers crossed, here’s to a good 2021 :)
