thoughts from union square

i spent friday night camping at caprice's by sophie with an iced matcha latte vacillating between work i.e. revamping the web / redesigning headers etc. & picking up sheryl sandberg's lean in to read. work won eventually bc i hate loafing on the job (i think i very much operate on reciprocality in most aspects of my life & this in particular stems from having worked with people who were just terrible team players) & by the time i was done it was nearly eight & the cafe was closing but i couldn't find it in myself to return to the apartment & face new people i don't really like / also i couldn't put down the book bc it spoke (still speaks) volumes to me so i headed to manhattan to find another cafe to read in before i left at ten to roam the city's streets at night / soak in alittle bit more of new york bc i will definitely miss this place so much. which is slightly surprising considering how homesick i was in the initial week of being here. i was walking through union square itself & it brought back memories of meeting my homie y for dinner there on my first day of being officially alone (how we had melted into spasms of happiness when we finally found each other & she had exclaimed "it's so good to see familiar people here"). i also remember (in retrospect) how on the morning of the following day i had cried from the pangs of acute loneliness when it finally sunk in that i was completely alone with ten more weeks to go & then told myself to suck it up & get ready for my second day of work.

walking through union square tonight i was in an entirely different place: with my heart expanding in my chest & my mind reeling from what i'd just read, i embraced my independence & celebrated the voice in my head that continues to affirm me this entire summer experience has indeed been the living embodiment of her advice. i have confronted & conquered something that (just thinking about it previously) had scared the living shit out of me i.e. to live & work alone in a big, foreign city (like sandberg points out i will stop thinking i am a scam & also stop downplaying my little victories - i would like to think i've been producing good work, esp if my boss continues to prefer my redesigned documents over the content his own hired graphic designer has been producing). i think it's this realisation that what looks initially almost impossible is in reality much easier to accomplish (this entire living & working alone experience turned out to be so much easier than i had envisaged in my head) that is giving me so much hope for the new semester ahead. part of me is so excited to apply this to fundraising because fundraising still scares the shit out of me - up till now i only have a vague idea of how to go about raising money for the next conference (& i can already anticipate how busy i will get / how much failure or rejection i'll meet along the way) but the only way to grow is to face it head-on & hope i won't die so badly in the process. & i know i'll have people to turn to along the way if i fall so i am pretty excited to see how everything will pan out. maybe i'll actually turn out to be kickass at it once i get the hang of it (just like how i remember feeling nervous af when i was told i would be completely taking over the reigns of all of the organisation's social media accounts - how was i going to shape the org's public image through the content i was churning or reposting /  how was i going to constantly come up with fresh content when i felt like i couldn't design shit? turns out it's completely manageable with practice & there are tools to simplify the process of graphic designing etc. - as a sidenote i remember how i used to spend all 7+ hours at work trying to think of what social media content to post but now i've evolved to spending only the last hour on social media). my boss once told us both interns he thinks college is over-rated; that we haven't even graduated yet but are doing the very jobs people are doing after getting their college degrees. i don't think he realised how big a compliment that was to me. till then i had always believed the workplace to be a scary place where people did corporate things way out of my league or scope of expertise. i didn't realise how i had completely undermined my skills myself, skills that i had gained & sharpened from being on the job. & this is why i must continue to do things which make me tremble: there is really nothing like experiential learning.

i have to skype qt um tomorrow for delegations work - which also reminds me that joining yma was a leap i had taken (& am still taking) to grow my skill set. i still have so much to learn & i will continue to grow until nothing fazes me anymore !!!