Only when I felt that itchy, warm stirring in my chest again did I realise how long it had been since I last felt it. Perhaps all along I just needed an opening, someone to give me a push from behind, and then I could make up my mind to take a new step, although even now I'm still not sure where this step will land.
I clearly remember one evening seven years ago, when I made up my mind to turn down master's offers in three fields, Marketing, Knowledge Management and New Media & Communication, and chose Computer Science, charging in the hardest direction, drawn by the wonderful feeling of creating and discovering things with my own hands. Compared with people who had been writing code and doing competitions since childhood, for someone like me, whose childhood interest in maths was ruthlessly snuffed out as it sprouted, who studied a half-business, half-engineering major at university, and who only became truly interested in information technology because of a database elective, this direction was always going to be hard; but back then I was set on giving it a try while I was young. In a flash, time has brought me to now.
A person is made of a chain of choices. Looking back at the years before and after that, I have made many other important choices: choosing to leave my original school or class, choosing to live a thousand miles from home, choosing to give up the chance to turn an internship into a job, choosing to leave a startup, choosing to leave a relationship... Almost every important choice was mine to make, and, as the way I've written them shows, every choice was also a giving-up and a parting. Here I have to bring up Tang Nuo's line again: "What matters is not what you chose, but what you gave up."
Others say that all the struggling, dithering and reluctance vanish the moment you make the decision, leaving you relieved and as calm as still water; a true farewell is always quiet. In reality it isn't always like that, but once every expectation or uncertainty has turned into reality, in the end you still come to accept everything from the bottom of your heart and look ahead calmly.
And now it's that time again. Even though the future is still hazy, I'm delighted to find a fire burning quietly in my heart once more.
In this tangled transitional period, looking back at everything that happened in those seven years, there is plenty of regret and dissatisfaction, but most of the crooked roads seem to have straightened out, all leading to me here and now. Comparing myself not with others but with myself, I can clearly see how I changed and grew in these seven years, and I have glimpsed some more precious things, whole and unchanged, stored quietly in the deepest place. For some things I loved but gave up halfway, it turns out my love is still there. If I had to name my biggest regret, it would be that I didn't spend enough time recording and expressing everything fully, in writing or by any other means. Boredom and numbness are the worst states a person can go through.
In those seven years, apart from the first, spent quietly studying, I seemed to settle into a corner for the next six, and yet I also seemed to be drifting and wavering all the time. In those seven years, for three of them, of all things, there was this enormous concept called the pandemic, and yet the pandemic also gave me a great deal. In those seven years, the world grew more and more chaotic, and many beliefs and ideals grew dimmer and dimmer. In those seven years, the pressure and pain of the real world were always lying in wait, and I never fully shook off the dark clouds of confusion, depression, loneliness and self-doubt. But lately, whether because the "turning thirty" meme brought a very strong sense of ritual, or because of some recent experiences, I suddenly have a strange feeling that I have never lived as freely as I do now.
So perhaps it really is time. Body and mind, it is time to keep moving forward.
To my future self: when, years from now, you look back at this moment and this piece, I trust you will be sure that the step taken then was no defeat, and that the next step you are about to choose will be no defeat either. More importantly: and if it were, so what?