Ana M Tarano @anatarano-blog - Tumblr Blog

“ you got framed “

I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler: Impatience Is a Virtue

Lately I have been feeling impatient about when/how social change should occur. I am continuously troubled by my lack of impact in leading to change. I always want to do more and I really feel like I need guidance as to how channel my energy toward social good.

My impatience turns to anger and leads to the surfacing of a lot of sadness regarding injustices in the West and in the world in general. I want to learn how to manage these feelings and channel them toward positive outcomes. I want to know what is the best way to use my time and resources effectively. I know I have a set of inherent skills, that includes leadership and empathy, but I don’t know how to marry it with my current career trajectory.

I have a few ideas about programs that I would like to start to make change but don’t know if people would be interested or how to get funding for them. But I guess I have to stop being afraid of what ifs and go for one of them. It’s hard to do though when your job demands your attention and you can’t concentrate on what matters most to you.

#stem #impatience #thoughts

Emerson and the Importance of Being Your Child Self

Lately I have been feeling very lost within my self, feelings of discomfort with my actions and reactions. This uneasiness has diminished since I have started remembering my child self. I feel like I am my most authentic self abiding by the rules of my child self because the world was not a spectrum back then. Truths were not obscured by subjectivism from societal sources. I was just me and understood only my reality. As I grew older, I started seeing other truths from my own and it turned my black and white world into a smeared grey with different intensities. I could no longer distinguish the white from the black: what was I and what was Other. Needless to say, I felt lost. What do I stand for? Who do I want to be? How do I interact with the external world and how does it affect me?

Emerson says that “[the children’s] mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered ... Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it” in Self-Reliance. Lately, I have been feeling like my eye has been conquered and shaped to view the world in a fashion that is not my own. I see myself acting due to conditioning and not self-analyzing. I’m playing a game of chess but I’m not even looking at where the opponent’s pieces lay, randomly moving my pieces aimlessly without strategy nor purpose. I want to change that. I want to feel in control and that I am authentic in all my facets. So I started thinking and remembering situations in my adolescence and analyzed how I reacted to them. I felt pride about how I carried myself and that self resonated with the present desired self I wish to embody. This self-trust on my child self reminded me of Emerson’s idealization of the child as the most natural state of the being. Now I feel more centered and can finally trust my self again. I still need to purge some of the conformities and illusions from my self but at least I am confident that I have a roadmap by which to initiate the shift from spectrum to binary.

#thoughts

#photos #Miami 2015

Making Decisions

Making decisions, the hard ones, can be very scary and exciting. In the past week, I have decided to shift fields and go more into biology-centered space research. Although there are many opportunities for this new idea to lead to failure, namely debt and no collaborator, I have decided to jump in head on.

I have realized that the only reasons that kept me from moving into this new field came from a place of insecurity and self-distrust, while the reasons that encouraged me to change fields came from a place of strength and confidence. This powerful realization led to an awakening that I want to be a person who makes decisions stemming from self-trust and empowerment and not fear.

I choose to invest in my dreams. I choose to invest in myself.

#life #thoughts