I still remember what it was like to be a child, to have the gift of doing something just for your own pleasure. This gift has all but disappeared. Only a memory of it remains.

Everything attempted nowadays is tainted with hypothetical judgement. Climb the ladder, achieve, prove yourself. Lean in. Where is your ambition? How will this be received? Is it good enough? Are you good enough? It is all plain exhausting and frankly it ruined everything it touched.

I crave that freedom of childhood, of making things because something came alive in my head and I wanted to see it in my hands. I miss that pure pleasure of creating. Pleasure untainted by judgements and expectations.

There is this constant need to prove myself, to rise above others, to show that I am ambitious and smart and deserving. I fucking hate it. If I could operate it out of myself, I would.

It seems wanting to change course opened up a can of worms. Since I wrote my first post on wanting to take charge of my life, things have been unraveling (at least in my head) quickly and the effects reverberating into all areas in my life.

All my fears, feelings of inadequacy and regrets have bubbled up to the surface. If you meet me at a cocktail party, I can tell you two stories, one shiny and pretty, the other mournful and bleak.

I am a female engineer. It seems all around me, simultaneously possessing the female reproductive system and having a degree in engineering is reason enough for heart-felt admiration. The worst part is a part of me believes that the admiration is deserved. Really? I bet no man receives that much of a positive reaction when he mentions his day job.

So if we meet at a cocktail party, and you ask me what do I do, I will say:

“Oh, I am an engineer. I mostly develop control solutions for heating systems, I work on the software part (that’s impressive, no? Especially for a woman!). But now I’m working only part-time so as to spend time with my seriously adorable (no really, they are freakin cute) children. That handsome guy over there? That’s my soon-to-be husband. He’s a wonderful father (he really is) and we’re planning our small lovely wedding this summer. We have a cute little place in the city with a charming rooftop terrace and wonderful neighbors (they really are). I’ve got a lot to be grateful for.”

There you go. Isn’t that splendid? It’s all true after all. And when I go online, many seem to be telling similar stories.

Then why is it that the story that holds itself in my head is darker and gloomier?

If I were that depressing person at a party who unloads their life problems on an unsuspecting I-was-just-being-nice party goer, I’d go a bit like this:

“Meh, I work as an engineer mostly because it sounded like an escape ticket to the free West when I was 17. I get no fulfillment from it though, mostly it earns me good money. I work part-time to help take care of my kids. They’re so cute but unfortunately they inherited my Mediterranean temper and their father’s German stubbornness. It’ll do them good in life I know, but my poor nerves! That guy over there? That’s my soon-to-be husband. It’s been 11 years man and I’ve been thinking of playing Katy Perry’s “Hot n Cold” as our wedding song. We have a cute little place in the city with a charming rooftop terrace and wonderful neighbors, but many days I have serious doubt that I’m cut for this happy little family gig.”

You might be thinking, “Good lord, what an ungrateful self-absorbed party-pooper.”  No? Well, that’s what I tell myself after I have my little for-one pity party.

Anyway if we were at my dream pity-party, Jibran Khalil Jibran would be there and he’d tell me:

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.

Yes true. I have an attitude problem. I sulk about many of the issues facing me without really doing anything about it. That’s when Goerge Bernard Shaw would intervene to add:

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

You are right too, George, just because I have a good life compared to others less fortunate, does not disqualify me from sadness or discontent.  But also I should not be so discontent to think that those who achieved more success have arrived into a nirvana beyond my reach.

But what would a dream party be without the master of all things quotes to tell me that:

What a wee little part to a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.

“Please marry me Mark Twain!”.

This is my problem. The real life led in my head feels unauthentic and out of my control. I’m following a blueprint that I did not consciously design. But most of all, I feel empty because I have not tried, and I have not failed.

Today, I’ll meet with a good friend and we’ll start our journey to try, perhaps fail, perhaps succeed. But at least try.

Plans to follow…

I listened to what Dilbert had to say, and I liked it.


In my neck of the woods, an embarrassing amount of time has been wasted on articles of the sort: “10 Things You Can Do Like Right Now To Become a More Awesome Person”, otherwise known as click-bait. Still, every once in a while, an article comes a long with a truly thought-provoking idea. And just like those damn long wooden beams in Hay Day, such ideas are frustratingly rare.


While looking online for what to do with my life – I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one doing that-, I stumbled across Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, in the Wall Street Journal talking about how goals are for losers, systems are for winners.  Create a system, he says, that fits your skills and abilities, and forget about setting goals and/or following your passion. There is no failure in the system itself, only how you interpret the results.  Perhaps at first, to put it kindly, they are lack luster. But with every iteration, your system gets better suited to you and eventually it will start producing what you dreamed it will.


Aiming for a particular goal, on the other hand, will make you feel like a failure until you reach that goal; if you do reach it, comes a fleeting period of euphoria, followed by the emptiness of losing the very reason for moving forward. A goal feels like a much-anticipated vacation – at least for those of us that use vacation as an escape. There’s the frustration that vacation time isn’t there already. Hallelujah, there comes the vacation, and you savour that week or two. Alas, at some point it is all over and you’re back to the way things are, disappointment.

As for my own system, when I graduated from college, I outlined my entrepreneurial plan. The idea was to create something that had value and—this next part is the key—I wanted the product to be something that was easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities.

Yesterday, for reasons unknown, I opened my have-not-been-touched-in-a-too-long-a-while Google Plus account. A very little yet conspicious red flag on the upper right corner alerted me to “new” notifications. Apparently a few of my friends have added me and I failed to respond. But then I felt my heart sink and blocks of concrete materialized out of no where in my stomach.

There she was. She added me and I didn’t respond.

May died last year. She was 29 years old. On a very rainy and dark saturday morning, she failed to see a red traffic light and was hit by a street tram. She died a few minutes later right there. Not an old lady in her own home,  surrounded by loved ones, you know, like we all love to assume we’ll go. No, young and healthy, lying on the street and surrounded by strangers. With no chance to say goodbye to anyone.

This little red flag was the bleak reminder that she existed and now she doesn’t. Just like that.

The suddeness of her passing shook me more than my own mother’s death. Even though my mother’s passing away brought out much deeper feelings of sadness and loss, she did die of cancer after suffering for two years. It somehow comforted me  that there was some sort of warning, a chance to prepare, even if we denied it the entire way. Not with May.

Of course, being human and casting ourselves in the center of everything, when someone close to you – and especially of your own age – dies, you see yourself in their shoes. You see this as a very real case of “it could’ve been me”; suddenly introspection hits you just like that tram. What am I doing with my life? Where are my  time and money disappearing? What will people say at my funeral? What will my children remember?

On the the anniversary of her death, I’m changing course. And here is my journey.