2021, what a year.
In this first week of 2022, I would like to write about the 21 lessons I learned from 2021. These little phrases and sentences do not come close to a clear picture of what a transformative year 2021 was for me, but I have to immortalize them somehow!
Accompanied video if you prefer audio/visual rather than texts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABzlfLN6aP4
Lesson 1: Always focus on what you can control
It is obvious that a lot of things are completely outside of our control, especially since 2020. It’s easy to feel like we’re just bunch of dead fish going with the flow. To an extent, it is true, but one thing I’ve learned through therapy is that we are in control of our own heaven or hell. We don’t always get to manipulate our circumstances, but how we respond is always within our control. Many things going on in my life had contributed to the depression that was swallowing me whole this past year. For a lot of those things, I have zero control over them. But I, unfortunately, refused to accept that, and so that feeling of helplessness grew and made matters even worse for me. So, in 2021, I pivoted and started focusing on what I CAN control, building my resilience from the ground up, going to therapy — which has helped me tremendously.
Lesson 2: It’s all about perspectives
Perspective is a beautiful thing. I have struggled immensely during the past two years in ways I never imagined I could, partially because everything happening in our lives right now seem so grand and overwhelming. I over-think so much that I become immobilized. My high school crush and later good friend has this question he often poses when I go to him complaining about random life shenanigans, and that is:
will it matter in 5 years?
Zooming out, the job we didn’t get, the paper we didn’t get to publish, the difficult conversations we have to navigate — most of them likely won’t matter years from now. It’s easy to have that heart-sinking feeling of “everything’s closing in” when all we know is short term, but in the long run, more often than not, it’s just a small wrinkle in life. How we feel or react really depends on the perspective we take on, and all it takes is zooming out.
Lesson 3: You’re not the victim
Over the course of 2021, I was once knees deep in depressive episodes where I feel like the world is out to get me. I retrieved into my little shells and would not leave. There were weeks where I would not go into lab during the day, because I was afraid of talking to my lab mates. I was afraid that they can see how broken I was and how much I don’t have my life together. Just that intense feeling of wanting to be alone knowing that being alone would only make matters worse deserves a novel in and of itself, but it was in its core, in my case, a victim mindset. This is not me trivializing my own feelings, it’s me realizing that my depressive episode triggered my victim mindset and an unhealthy perspective on life, making my recovery much harder. It took tremendous work for me to get to this level of self-awareness, and this has become a mantra.
I am not the victim.
As much as the various events want me to believe, I am not the victim. So, what do I do?
Lesson 4: Be the hero
This is something I read on James Clear’s newsletter. Cus D’Amato, the legendary boxing trainer of Mike Tyson and other top fighters, said this:
“…what is the difference between a hero and a coward? What is the difference between being [cowardly] and being brave? No difference. Only what you do. They both feel the same. They both fear dying and getting hurt. The man who is [cowardly] refuses to face up to what he’s got to face. The hero is more disciplined and he fights those feelings off and he does what he has to do. But they both feel the same, the hero and the coward…”
(Source: Bad Intentions: The Mike Tyson Story)
So, I learned to be the hero.
Lesson 5: Keep asking why
This was a lesson my boyfriend taught me. I have been an emotional mess from a multitude of events, and I often have a problem of not willing to share what was wrong. So he kept asking why. And that often ended with me having a total breakdown but feeling much better afterwards.
The same principle can be applied to learning and my (or yours) grad school life. We need to keep asking why to get to the intentionality with learning, and WHY we are pursuing something, for example, a PhD. For me, I felt like I got thrown into the deep end going into grad school, but having that end goal and the Why in mind were like having a map presented to me. A light house of sorts. All I need to do is to not second guess myself and go full-force.
Lesson 6: At crossroads, use the “fuck it” attitude
A less vulgar way of phrasing this lesson of mine should go: take more risks within reason. I have always been one to want to keep myself safe figuratively and literally. As I reflect on my life so far, however, I actually took a lot more risks than I realized. And I was lucky that I did.
I dropped out of high school to directly attend college; I opted to transfer instead of staying four years at the same institution; I chose to initiate a brand new project no one has worked on before as my dissertation project; and of course, at this stage of my phd, I’m choosing to do a law degree (not a JD, oh my God) on top to better position myself for a post-graduate market.
I have been employing a technique that I only later found out to be used by Jeff Bezos as well. It’s known as his regret minimization framework.
I try to minimize the amount of regrets I would have if I look back in a few years. Unlike Jeff Bezos, who in his model has fast forwarded 80 years, I try not to jump the gun too much and ask myself two questions:
In five years, will I regret not trying this?
Will I make it count if I do do this?
If the answer is yes on both questions, I stop questioning myself and I just do it. If I have doubts on either of those questions, I table it or just don’t bother with it. We need to remember: life is happening as we are living it. Our lives are what we’re making of it right now, and the most respectful way to ourselves that we can go about it is to make it count.
Lesson 7: Be a scientist of life, not just in lab
I also try to be a scientist of life, not just in lab. As a scientist-in-training, I run experiments everyday. Most fail, some really show me the marvel of science. You don’t have to be a scientist to use the scientific method, though! No one knows if a certain protein is important for a certain type of cancer, the only way to know is to run tests. We never know if something will work for us, and the only way to know is to give it a go.
Especially this year, I am really challenging myself. I’ve always been interested in law, so I tried it out to see if it works. Fortunately it has been working out thus far. Since I started balancing law and science, I’m doing something I’ve never done before and finding things out about myself each day. Each day, I’m gaining clarity, slowly but surely, through actions and not just thoughts. Thus, I think being the scientist in life is a valuable lesson I’ve taken away from my law journey so far.
Lesson 8: Boundaries are everything
I’ve learned to realize that not one aspect of my life, be it work or relationship or health, should completely overtake my life. Setting boundaries for myself feels like giving the evil in me a curfew, which is a weird but accurate analogy, and it has been the saving grace in a lot of situations in my life.
Lesson 9: Connect, connect, connect
Since life was put on hold last year, I have been having an existential crisis about what I want to do post-graduation. This is something I don’t think anyone is prepared for going into grad school. There has been a lack of guidance in that arena until my third year of PhD, and I — this was on me — never thought about where I wanted my career to go until last year. So for 2021, I took it upon myself to reach out more and learn about the options I have. I started hosting monthly international virtual meet-ups for a group of PhDs and PhD students. As an introvert, it was something I never thought I’d do. I connected with so many people during these meet-ups, and those connections spiraled into so much more that I’m beyond grateful for. I’ve gotten offer to refer me to positions, and I’ve gotten secondary connections that helped shape my decision to pursue law in addition to my PhD. You just never know what doors can be opened. So connect, connect, connect!
Lesson 10: Perfection is boring
I’m not even going to pretend I have my life under control, because I don’t. This lesson seems incredibly cliche and commonsense, but it took me a long time to get to this understanding: being human is cool, and the imperfections make us us. If someone is perfect, I can only imagine the smooth sailing has made their life incredibly boring, and they’d be only good for 20 minutes of small talks at the dinner table anyway. The trauma and the ups and downs give us stories to tell and wider spectrum of emotions to feel, and that is a beautiful thing.
Lesson 11: Learn to love yourself
Need I say more? You can never love anyone if you can’t love yourself, and per the amazing Bell Hooks (RIP):
Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.
We’re not perfect, but we deserve to be embraced and loved for what makes us us.
Lesson 12: Life’s too short, laugh at yourself
Regrettably, I’m notorious for being a serious person. Whenever my friends tell a cheeky joke or poke fun at me, I always take it too seriously. I saw life as something I have to tackle instead of something I should have fun with. And this year, being all over the place physically and mentally, my support system had really push me to laugh at myself. Ups and downs, they’re just wrinkles thrown in to make my life fun. Keeping it light really makes it more enjoyable and durable.
Lesson 13: It’s okay to not know
Shocker, but I’m gonna say it now. No one has it together. No one has all the answers. If you want me to name the ONLY thing I take away from grad school, it would be this: there is no shame in saying “I don’t know.” Admitting we don’t know something is a sign of intelligence — it’s not putting up a façade or a manufactured perfection. It’s being vulnerable and honest, and it’s part of our collective human experience. You can’t know everything from the start, that’d be inhuman and you’d be really bored on this Earth, just saying.
Lesson 14: Self-awareness is the most underrated skill
Being at peace with yourself and totally in sync with yourself — that self-knowledge — is the most underrate skill ever, hands down. Learning more about myself through various life experiences of 2021 has really taught me what I should let go, where I should recalibrate, and where I should push forward. It’s almost like holding a magnifying glass on my pool of random diamonds that are my actions, finding the diamonds that best reflect who I am (self-knowledge,) and making them into jewelry that I will use and cherish forever, just like how we gain wisdom from those experiences. Developing self-awareness and leaning how to act in sync of our true selves can be the most rewarding achievement you’ll ever have.
Lesson 15: People can’t read your mind
I was not brought up to be forward with my feelings. Feelings, *rechts*, gross. I have never heard my parents say “I love you.” Even though my boyfriend and I have been together for almost 3 years, it took me a long time to get to the point where I could tell him my feelings and I still would get incredibly embarrassed by that verbalization. I’ve also always always felt awkward asking for stuff because I didn’t want to be a nuisance. I didn’t want to cause inconvenience to other people. It was so bad at this that my boyfriend yelled one time, “JUST SAY WHAT YOU ARE THINKING NO ONE KNOWS WHAT GOES ON IN YOUR F**KING MIND!!”
Anyway, he really pushed me to express my feelings. And slowly but surely, this year, I worked on it and greatly improved. I tell people I care about how much I love them even if I feel embarrassed about it. If things upset me, I assert yourself without being too aggressive. I start asking for things without fear of rejection I stopped bottling up my emotions and just let my openness take its course. Being brutally honest is better than letting people guess what I’m thinking and guess it wrong.
Lesson 16: Brutal honesty is good for you
This one dives deeper into honesty: rule your mind before it rules you. You can keep telling yourself things that you’re not, but when you rule your mind by being openly honest with your flaws and shortcomings, you rule your world. You have the freedom to identify your limiting beliefs, along the line of developing deep self awareness. So practice that openness on yourself. Say “I really want X, but …” or really dive deep into honest reasons beyond your actions. The choice is yours to make every day.
Lesson 17: Health is wealth, take care of it like taking care of your $$
The city I was from and my parents still live in to this day has this saying, “time is money, efficiency is life.”
After this year, I would like to add: health is wealth.
Since I could remember, I’ve had really bad asthma and many a surgery likely above average of how many you would have at my age. My parents are both physicians, so they have thankfully kept me alive this far. However, I’ve never realized the importance of my physical, mental, and emotional health as much as I have this year. I had a pretty big health scare last month, and it made me realize that nothing that I have right now would matter if I could not nurture or protect health, my most valuable asset. Good health is often wasted at young ages because we like to get drunk and feel cool, but it is whisked away way too fast before we all have a chance to appreciate it for what it’s worth. Our bodies are truly an invaluable part of our existence, and we need to invest in it like what we do with our monetary wealth.
Lesson 18: Gratefulness takes the sharp edge off of life
Life might give us lemons from time to time. These two years, life gave us a whole lemon orchard. But as a wise man once said, you always look on the bright side.
He’s not wrong.
October was an extremely difficult month for me as I navigate the loss of my grandfather and the peak of my depressive episodes. I felt like all I did was to be stomped on and the world was out to get me. Practicing gratitude had been an on-and-off habit of mine for years, and people around me have encouraged me to stay on that for as much as I could.
I did. And it saved my life.
Always look for something to be grateful for even in the most horrible days. Gratitude makes us less self-centered and reminds us of the things or individuals that brought out the best in us. For me, it gave me the courage to keep going because if not for me, I want to fight for the people and things that I’m grateful for everyday, the people and things that had been there for me at my lowest low. It makes life more bearable because of their sheer presence, and as I stated earlier, gratitude takes the sharp edge off life.
Lesson 19: Failure is the greatest source of wisdom
I have thought about dropping out of my PhD program more times than I cared to admit. One can say I stayed because of my love for science, one can also say I stayed because of the sunken cost fallacy. But I will give credit where it’s due! Being in academia, grad school and a PhD program taught me in practice that the 1% of success was built on 99% of figurative and literal crying, screaming, tearing my hair out, and pure frustration.
I chose to work on something no one in my lab or in the field, really, as my dissertation project. So while some of my peers who took over other people’s projects coming in are already publishing, I am still trying to standardize and optimize the most basic experimental conditions because, well, no one has done it before. I was the only person working on that project up until a month ago, so the project was going at snail speed. I felt like nothing was working and I was a massive failure. But now, as we move fast towards a solid paper because my hard work had been replicated successfully, it really hit me:
Science, like any form of art, go through what my mentor accurately put as an “ugly duckling” phase. The moment I want to break the canvas and throw it out is always the moment I know that the painting will start taking its real form.
And so, when you fail at something, take a look at what you’ve been doing, adjust and align your actions to your goal, and try again. Learn from your failures and just keep on swimming.
Lesson 20: It’ll pass eventually
I think this one ties into the last lesson. While failing at stuff sucks, it is not permanent and in the grand scheme of things, unless you found yourself in extreme circumstances, those failures, in my opinion, are a tiny drop in our buckets of life. Cliche, but hey, if it works, it works. All of these are temporary. Whatever challenges we might be experiencing, including this pandemic — they too, will pass. The caveat here, though, is that the same will be said about the good times too, like the times I get to be in California with my boyfriend or China with my family. Those times will pass as well.
Lesson 21: Read
Finally, the last lesson: read. Books have been a constant in my life. It’s my routine bedtime activity, and it’s been awesome to have that small period of peacefulness after a day of frenzy. As 2021 draws to a close, I do encourage you to look back on Read a lot. Aside from helping you gain more knowledge, reading helps keep your brain limber and less prone to memory problems. Determine to live fully and continually learn. Prepare for what life has to teach by being open to the lessons in everything you do and experience.
As I finalize this long article, we are already ringing in the new year. Wishing you, my dear readers, a peaceful, lovely, productive 2022. We got this!
