What’s worth fighting and what’s not?
After coding for 6 days straight, I decided to rest a little bit and start to grow vegetables. It’s certainly not for cheaper food or self-sustainment. It’s mostly for the emotional value of enjoying the process of interacting with a live being and seeing the changes through the passage of time.
Interacting with a live being gives people a sense of connection (I have a direct impact on the vegetables) and control (even though other things in our everyday life are not controllable, at least I can control the results of growing vegetables), seeing the changes brings people a sense of uncertainty (future expectation of whether or not the vegetables are gonna do gives us some uncertainty in receiving a positive reward, which is one of the cores of creating addictive gaming), those emotional needs are very much necessary for sustaining a psychologically healthy life.
Similar concepts can be applied to why people like doing gym, having pets, and baking bread. A sudden obsession with these routines might be an indication that the person is going through some uncertain time in their life where they are unable to seek other forms of happiness.
I was watching Chef’s Table season 5 on Netflix, and the first episode really got me. It’s about a female illegal Mexican immigrant who opened a top-rated restaurant in PA. After all these years, she’s still unable to meet her daughter in person and is still an illegal immigrant even though she married a U.S. citizen. She’s fighting for immigrant rights and her restaurant is a place that can bring comfort to other immigrants.
I had a very similar situation where I felt very helpless as well. For all those years I have been trying to ignore the elephant in the room and instead trying to live a rather normal life given all these disadvantages. At some point, I accept that there are things I cannot change, and just focus on my own life. As much as I want to justify the actions I took over these years, this passive attitude can backfire. I start to gradually lose my ability to fight for anything, at least the things I should be fighting for.
As I mentioned before, when people are being cut off from other sources of happiness, they start to focus on getting happiness from the small little things (I’m not talking about people who’re doing it because of passion or professions, of course). There’s nothing wrong with it, but it shouldn’t be a curtain that blinds people from facing the actual problem in their life. Similarly, a person who is unbalanced in their life (not financially independent, or doing works they feel no connection to, or has trauma such as fear of abandonment in their childhood) might seek emotional compensation from other people. And here is the tricky thing - We shouldn’t fight for a relationship, at least not too hard.
By fighting, I mean acts such as trying to get your love back when the other party clearly has their own plan in their life that didn’t include you. I guess you could still poke them once in a while if you really really liked them, and things could change (and it actually kind of worked in my case), but in the end, there’s nothing much you can do about their feelings and decisions no matter how much you prefer them to be part of your life. However, it is worth putting hard work into maintaining a relationship if both parties are committed to each other, and maintaining is so different from fighting, it’s an action that two people in a relationship decided to do together, and there’s no chasing and catching game. It’s a cooperation game, and we all know everything will be much easier when people are putting the energy in the same direction.
When I look back, I know there’s a big emotional hole within me because of all the initimate family connections I was being forced to cut off since middle school, that being an out-of-status temporary resident and afraid of not being able to stay or find a job, that just because I’m a colored woman that I have to face all the explicit or implicit discriminations from my day to day life. Those are the things I need to face and should be fighting for. If I could build something, I shouldn’t be satisfied with just growing vegetables in my backyard.
I was watching a pretty popular Korean TV show called Extraordinary Attorney Woo, and there’s a case about female rights in the discriminated workplace. Even though in the end the people who fought for female rights didn’t win, they’re not frustrated, because to them the process of fighting already meant something. At first, I feel it was a self-deceiving mental victory type of attitude, but I saw the real world parallel today where the second trial of the infamous Xianzi’s sexual assault case happened in China also lost, but it didn’t stop people from celebrating this “defeat”. More women will be able to know the judicial process and the power they have when they get assaulted, more cases will be exposed than being muted forever, and it might work, just like Japan’s Shiori Ito case.
When to be patient and when to not be?
When I start to write this journal, I was trying to talk about patience, and how instant gratification makes me want the vegetables to start to sprout the next day. I want to worship the things that are made of the magic “aggregated time” from marinated meat to ceramics. Then it went another way. However, it also makes me look at patience in a different way. We should be more patient with our precious relationships, our plants, pets, food cooking, and enjoying the moment, but not patient with our urge to actualize interesting ideas, claim our rights, or kiss our loved ones. Waiting for my veggies to sprout probably will feel much shorter when I was engaging in my life.