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28-Morning routine (December 2020)

My friends call me a morning person, and I think for the most part, this is true. I feel the most productive and motivated in the mornings, when I know I have the entire day to do what I need to, rather than at night, when I feel short on time. My morning routine is a mix of good and bad, with making my bed a habit I want to keep and scrolling through my notifications a hazardous one I need to get rid of.

I never skip breakfast. A bowl of oatmeal, mixed with peanut butter and topped with banana slices. Or a slice of vegan bread with scrambled eggs and soy milk. I need a hearty, healthy breakfast to kickstart my day and fuel my body with energizing nutrients. I know a lot of people would rather get in that 30 minutes of extra sleep over preparing breakfast, but I’m one of the odd ones who would choose food over sleep.

Next is, dare I say, the most essential part of my morning: coffee. My go-to is an iced black coffee, not too watery, with ample ice, and large enough to sip on throughout the first half of the morning. I used to buy a coffee each morning before work, but recent events have changed that to my making coffee at home, a huge money saver (one of the rare silver linings of the pandemic). If I must, I can skip breakfast. But I cannot miss my morning coffee.

The rest of the morning differs. Sometimes I’ll write, other times I’ll work out. Wherever my inclinations lead me, really. Starting from December, my mornings freed up greatly as I started my winter break and ended work. At first I didn’t know what to do with myself with all of this free time, but I’ve learned to enjoy the slow, leisurely pace that this winter has gifted me with. Who knows when I’ll be able to have this sort of freedom again.

#charli

26_Something about me

Some people might be surprised to hear that I am actually very shy. And those who already know that about me might be surprised to hear that I hate that about myself. I’ve always been a bit jealous of those people who can spontaneously get on stage or network with new people cold. I think it might have to do with my upbringing and being put under the spotlight involuntarily too many times, or that perfectionist side in me that’s always afraid to make a mistake. But at age 24, I still have anxiety calling a friend for a simple favor or emailing a professor to ask a question. I’m not sure if my shyness has gotten better or worse after being forced to speak up in a new language over the course of five years, but the fact of the matter is, it’s still there. Perhaps it’s why I am more comfortable with writing my thoughts rather than saying them, because I can hide behind the faceless nature of a keyboard. But until I can confidently and unabashedly finish any tasks that require me to go outside of my comfort zone, I’m going to have to fake it until I make it (a saying which is true ;) ).

#charli

28_Five fears

Growing up. I’ve leaned into and used my youth to my advantage for the past 24 years. I fear that I won’t be able to stand on my own without having youth on my side. Although, I’ll probably be well equipped to tackle problems that come my way as an adult when the time comes, thinking about it at this point is quite a scary thing.

Being alone. I didn’t used to be someone who often got lonely; I was more than happy to spend time by myself. But starting last year, I think I started to understand a little more about loneliness and what that feels like.

Never reaching my potential. I’ve been told growing up that I have potential. I fear that I’ll never reach it or come disappointingly short. I feel like I’ve worked hard enough to reap some beneficial outcomes, but whether or not it’ll ever reach its peak is an unknown y-factor.

My friends secretly disliking me. This isn’t meant to sound like a self-deprecating, compounding insecurity as so much as a fleeting thought from time to time. Maybe I’ve been watching way too much deception-themed Netflix shows these days, but the other day I thought to myself, “What if my ‘best friends’ have been pretending this whole time?” It was quite daunting.

Heights. Need I say more?

#charli

27_A song from my childhood

Jojo: Just a little to late

Come with me

Stay the night

You say the words but boy it don't feel right

What do ya expect me to say

(You know it's just too little too late)

You take my hand

And you say you've changed

But boy you know your begging don't fool me

Because to you it's just a game

(You know it's just too little too late)

So let me go now

'Cause time has made me strong

I'm starting to move on

I'm gonna say this now

Your chance has come and gone

And you know...

It's just too little too late

A little too long

And I can't wait

But you know all the right things to say

(You know it's just too little too late)

You say you dream of my face

But you don't like me

You just like the chase

So be real

It doesn't matter anyway

(You know it's just too little too late)

Yeah yeaaahhh...

It's just too little too late... Mhmmm

I was young

And in love

I gave you everything

But it wasn't enough

And now you wanna communicate

(You know it's just too little too late)

Go find someone else

And letting you go

I'm loving myself

You got a problem

But don't come asking me for help

'Cause you know...

It's just too little too late

A little too long

And I can't wait

But you know all the right things to say

(You know it's just too little too late)

You say you dream of my face

But you don't like me

You just like the chase

So be real

It doesn't matter anyway

(You know it's just too little too late)

I can love with all of my heart, baby

I know I have so much to give (I have so much to give)

With a player like you I don't have a prayer

That's the way to live

Ohhhh... mmm nooo

It's just too little too late

Yeaahhhh...

It's just too little too late

A little too long

And I can't wait

But you know all the right things to say

(You know it's just too little too late)

You say you dream of my face

But you don't like me

You just like the chase

So be real

It doesn't matter anyway

(You know it's just too little too late)

You know it's just too little too late

I can't wait...

It's just too little too late

A little too long

And I can't wait

But you know all the right things to say

(You know it's just too little too late)

You say you dream of my face

But you don't like me

You just like the chase

So be real

It doesn't matter anyway

(You know it's just too little too late)

#charli

like-fairy-tales

By: Sophie

#charli

24_Highs and lows of 2020

2020 was probably the tumultuous year I’ve witnessed in my short 24-year lifespan. I felt like I was immersed in a movie for the most part, being in disbelief time and time again at the unfolding of the world’s events. I was extremely fortunate to not have personally experienced any life-altering events, and had a relatively stable year. Other than the drastically decreased amount of social interaction and gym sessions, my 2020 was largely unaffected by the pandemic come to think of it.

Let’s start with the lows of 2020 to get the negatives out of the way. I would say the biggest disappointment for me was not being able to go to the US for grad school. I was supposed to move to Chicago this summer to attend my dream school. I ended up doing the latter, but at 4:00 a.m. over Zoom on choppy Wifi. While I loved my professors, the courses and my classmates, I couldn’t help but to selfishly think it was not quite the experience I had imagined. Being a morning person, taking classes and exams late at night greatly affected my sleep patterns and, if I’m quite honest, made me more temperamental than usual. I hated being agitated over a lack of sleep, and I was apologetic toward those who had to be on the receiving end of my outbreaks. But I give myself credit for trooping through the rough hours and handing in all of my assignments. One semester down, only three more to go.

My high point of 2020 was seeing my parents over the summer. We hadn’t anticipated their last-minute visit to Korea, as the pandemic had created all sorts of travel regulations from both the Canadian and Korean government as well as my parents’ workplaces. But thankfully, they were able to come to Seoul to spend a wonderful few weeks with my sister and me. I missed them dearly and highly treasured my time with them. Every year, we grow a bit closer. I think it’s because we’re all a step closer to achieving our individual dreams for work and our collective dream as a family. Unfortunately I don’t know when I will be seeing them again, so I am holding the memories made over the summer close to my heart.

I hope 2021 will be a different year, one that allows for free choice rather than limited options. I’ve had a year full of unexpected events. I’m ready for a fresh start.

#charli

23_Things I miss

Around this time of year, my parents are either in Korea, or I am weeks away from flying to Canada to see them. This year neither will happen. I miss my parents dearly, and I hope they are doing well.

Cafes have been a hotspot for the spread of the virus, and Seoul no longer allows customers to sit inside. Takeout only. I miss having a go-to post-dinner spot for some hot peppermint tea or decaffeinated iced americano. Instant coffee can only give me so much of the same experience. I miss going to cafes, worry-free that the air vents will circulate the virus into my lungs. I miss my corner seat at my local Starbucks, where I would go to study or work for hours on end by myself.

I’ve invested in a set of resistance bands, but it’s not the same as weights at the gym. I miss my daily workouts at the gym, a place I’ve been frequenting for the past five years. At this point, I think I worked out more at home or outside than I have in the gym in 2020.

I really miss going out dancing with my girlfriends. There’s nothing like living the music with some strappy boots and black eyeliner. I miss dancing until we’re covered in sweat, the night being more of a cardio session than anything else.

#charli

22_Today’s journal entry

Today is December 17. 2020, day 300-something of the pandemic. I’ve stayed at home, leaving only for groceries or exercise, for over three consecutive weeks. I’ve never done this before. As someone who used to go out of the house everyday almost all day, this involuntary at-home lifestyle was, at first, quasi-confinement.

I miss my family. I miss my friends. I miss going out to eat my favorite foods and sitting at cafes, writing away the afternoon. I miss life before the pandemic.

To be honest, I think I spent the majority of 2020 in fruitless hope that the virus would go away. The experts told us it would be over by the summer, so I spent spring anticipating July. In the summer, they indicated that a vaccine would come out by the end of the year (although there have been recent developments on that front), or that we would develop herd immunity. That didn’t happen either. I at least had some hope that people would do their respective parts to curb the infections as a collective effort. Joke was on me.

Everyone has lost something this year. Be it a job, or travel opportunity, or a loved one. I am not exempt from this and have my own losses. But I’ve also gained a lot this year, and am grateful for those silver linings.

The pandemic has gifted me with time to myself that I would have NEVER taken for myself. As mentioned, I used to spend almost every waking hour outside working, socializing, working out or finishing other miscellaneous tasks. Even on days I had nothing planned, I made things to do just to get out of the house. Don’t get me wrong, productivity is great. But it came to a point I was actively avoiding spare time out of an irrational fear of falling behind or missing out.

After an incredibly slow and uncomfortable first few days of staying at home, I gradually made routines for myself and found ways to keep myself occupied, even in isolation. I grew accustomed to staying at home and found ways to balance rest and productivity. I learned how to sit still and stay at home.

It only took a pandemic to make me be okay with just being and not doing.

#charli

minimalist-home

#charli

21_Best friends

Growing up, I thought that with being best friends came some unspoken contract to talk to each other everyday, be available for them at any given time and to say everything and I mean EVERYTHING to one another. My outlook has drastically changed since then: I now think a true best friend is someone who will stay loyal and equally as reliable without having those stipulations.

College, and even more so high school, is a place where you can essentially be attached at the hip with your best friends. You can take classes together, hang out on campus, study together… the environment sets it up so that you have constant access to them in regards to time and proximity. It’s easy.

It’s a very different picture after graduating and splitting off into your respective careers. Weekdays are pretty much off limits, weekends are limited for both you and your friends. Your offices might be across the entire city, or even across the country. You have to make a conscious effort even just to reach out to them. Messaging them about your list of daily happenings doesn’t come as naturally now that you’re in completely different settings. Being immersed in a different world from the socially-fostering nature of school, you and your best friends will stand the test of transitioning into adulthood.

This is the stage in life you find out who your true best friends are. As your life throws at you more obligations and demands more of your undivided attention, you won’t have the time or room to keep in your life the peripheral acquaintances that you might have considered a friend. No, this doesn’t make you a bad person. It’s just how life is.

I am extremely blessed to have a circle of best friends who reciprocate my efforts to stay in touch on a regular basis. While it may take months before we manage to find time to meet up in person, we still text at least a few times a week (thank you modern technology). When we do finally see each other in person, it’s as if no time has passed at all. Picking up right where we left off, we chatter away with the latest details of our work, home and love lives, questioning the purpose of life and finally being able to vocalize our thoughts that would be deemed otherwise problematic.

While in the past I felt the need to tell my best friends every single thought crossing my mind, I now feel like a best friend should be able to tell what I’m thinking without my saying anything.

“Charli, you’re hungry right?”

“What, how did you know?”

“I just do. Let’s go get you a salad, you bunny.”

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

#grace

17_Love

Letting someone have that last piece of cake, handing them the bigger piece of the pie

Giving someone a ride home even though it’s half an hour out of your usual route

Feeling sad when they’re sad, being unbelievably happy for them, proud of them, feeling what they’re feeling

Willing to give up an argument, or more importantly, forgiving despite what they did

Taking note of something that reminded you of them, and just to mention it to them later

Feeling like they’re within you, like when they breathe in, you’re breathing out, not knowing exactly where they begin or where they end in occupying your body and mind

All of these things involve putting a small part of yourself down, and embracing this person.

in a way, you’re telling yourself, Despite everything, this person comes first In those moments you’re saying, You are important, and you mean more than I do

Love is saying, You are a part of me, That’s why what you need is what I need, and what I want is what you want. Love is you and me, or better said, it’s becoming we. Love is us.

#grace

16_To remember everything is both a blessing and a curse

I meet you, you tell me your name, we exchange smiles and conversation, and you leave with an impression of me, and (hopefully) maybe a new friend.

But I leave with every detail of you. From the way that your hair is frizzy at the ends but your bangs are perfectly curled tells me that you fell asleep after taking a shower last night, but you made sure to leave your bang roller in. I remember that you like your coffee with soymilk but an extra shot of syrup, that when you get nervous you have a habit of cracking your knuckles, that you don’t like tomatoes but you like ketchup, and I remember that when you talk about your dad there’s a tinge of pride mixed with a desire to live up to his name.

It’s like something, or someone, in one corner of my mind, is cataloguing everything, and there are rows of archives. In the other corner are public records of conversations I’ve had, and when I’m working or by myself, I tend to pore over each line, each word to dilute the exact meaning.

On good days, being meticulous can be an advantage. But on my bad days, I beat myself up over everything. Why I said something at that exact moment, why I made that sort of expression, how I showed how I really felt, maybe I could have responded better or maybe have been less judgmental or more understanding. It’s like a game of chess, I replay all the plays that I’ve made and critique each move. I learn from my actions, but like I said, on my bad days, I dig myself into a deep pit of guilt that can affect my mood for days. It’s deeply unhealthy, and it’s worse since it’s an inner battle.

Now, being conscious of how deep I delve into a certain emotion is always on top of my daily to do list. I have to remind myself that sometimes being thorough can add more to the hysteria rather than solve issues. Stepping back, putting the matter at hand down and letting it go, is a something I’m constantly working on.

#grace

20_When you write

Writing and I go a long way back. Like back to when I was three and asked my mom to teach me the ABCs. I can’t remember exactly what prompted my toddler self to be so obsessed with words, their composition and syntactic organization, but I picked up reading and writing very quickly.

By the time I was in kindergarten I was writing a daily journal, albeit in 6-year-old language, and reading aloud books to my classmates while my teacher Ms. Comstock (my favorite teacher to this day) ran to the bathroom, leaving the class unattended. Not sure if it was a foreshadowing of the future or sheer coincidence, but my affinity for language grew to my pursuing writing as a career.

Fast forward to present day, writing is the focal point of my work and livelihood. Having worked as a writer and currently majoring in journalism, I write on a daily basis on topics ranging from mental health in the workplace to North Korean defectors. I don’t remember exactly how many articles or stories I’ve written at this point, but enough to say that I know the world is so much more than my immediate bubble of experiences and reality. One of the most rewarding aspects of being a writer is that I have primary access to so many stories that I would never have come across otherwise.

“You can write more eloquently than most people can speak,” one of my professors at grad school told my class this past semester. I think it’s a true statement, at least just for myself: I can express myself much better through writing than through talking. I feel like there’s only a certain level of explanation and context I can provide when conversing whereas for writing I can go as deep as I want into the nitty gritty details. When I write, I feel like people are hearing not only my external voice, but also my internal one. It’s the closest thing I can get to disclosing the thousands of thoughts racing through my head every single day.

All this being said, I’m ironically still figuring out the type of writer that I am and aspire to be. Malcolm Gladwell and Haruki Murakami would be close to the style of writing I enjoy, but I am scores away from reaching that level of fluidity and ability to express. There are times I look back on my work from the past and cringe. Maybe someday I’ll look back on this writing challenge and do the same, but I’m the first one to admit that there’s room for improvement and that I’m still just learning. That’s what we’re all here to do, right?

#charli

bruwho

@juliettebelangerc

#charli

19_Darkness

I’ll preface today’s prompt by saying that luckily enough, I haven’t encountered a lot of darkness in my life. But I have experienced dark emotions and can divulge my personal take on those.

I grew up associating anger, sadness, and stress with shame and guilt. Growing up in an Asian household could have played a part in this, or it could have been from my unbudging perfectionism, but in any case, I was not allowed to feel negative emotions. They were a sign of weakness, a fault in an otherwise bulletproof, shiny exterior.

Repressing such emotions had inevitable side effects: high levels of self doubt, validity seeking tendencies and mostly likely golden child syndrome (although this is just a hunch).

It wasn’t until I hit my late teens/early 20s that I started accepting these emotions as normal and an innate part of the human experience. I had moved to Korea for school, a polar opposite world to the one I had grown up in and was used to. Language, culture, mindset, humor. All were completely foreign to me and I felt my identity caving inwards. I didn’t know how to fit in. I didn’t even know where to start. It was heartbreaking.

I don’t remember a lot of details from that period in my life, they’re shrouded in gray. But I do remember the day I changed my perspective on the darker emotions. I was scrolling through my Facebook feed and came across a TED talk. I forget who the speaker was, but she said something like the following: “sadness, hurt, frustration… these are all natural, biological experiences of a human being. When did we start associating with something natural as bad?”

Call it cliche to have your life drastically changed by a TED talk, but that’s exactly what happened. I realized that the majority of whatever I was going through was from shame and self-deprecation from carrying negative emotions rather than the actual emotions themselves. What would happen if I just accepted them? Would there somehow be a weight lifted off my chest and room to breathe just a little more?

It’s only then when things started looking up. If I was sad or stressed, rather than hiding behind denial, I just accepted that it was okay to feel those things. And sure, it hurt at the time, but it always passed and I would be laughing before I knew it. It’s better to acknowledge their existence rather than resist. Knowing that all emotions, both good or bad, will pass has greatly contributed to my mental and emotional stability since then. At times, life will be bright. At others, dark. And that’s okay. It’s normal.

#charli

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