What Did You Learn This Year?

2021 has definitely been a strange year, as we progressed into the “Sophomore year” of the pandemic. We made more lifestyle changes and created a new balance for ourselves. I’m curious, how have you changed and what did you learn this year?

I definitely switched things up, which created a lot of ups and downs during the journey. Here are a few things in a flashback:

Being a Digital Nomad

Spending the entire pandemic trapped in one place was not fun. Especially when you hear traffic 24/7 living in Manhattan, getting swirled into the endless jungle of skyscrapers and crowds, wherever you go. Mentally, it was very stressful. By spring this year, me and my friends were tired of our formerly beloved city life, and we longed to escape to somewhere quiet and relaxing. We headed west, and spent a big chunk of our summer working remotely while exploring national parks in the Pacific Northwest.

It was a great fun, and a major check off of my bucket list. I was taken away by some of the most beautiful views I’ve seen in my life. Spending most of the pandemic in a huge quarter-life crisis, questioning everything I was doing and feeling confused about my future, I felt I was living again when I went on this road trip.

Nature definitely put life into perspective, and everything seemed so trivial against it. I would never forget the absolute calm and other worldliness I felt near the top of the mountain at the Olympic National Park, surrounded by only trees and wild flowers. The sublimity of the mountains and glaciers in Montana. And the lake where I could see all its rocks in the bottom. Some other interesting memories:

Overcoming fear when climbing narrow cliffs:
The first time I was on a ~90 degree cliff, some 7000 feet above in Mount Fremont near Seattle, everything 5 feet and below was covered in a complete fog. I could not imagine what it would be like to trip and fall; I was too scared to take even one step. I was also hiking by myself - my friends were on another much harder trail above my level. Next to me, a father was encouraging his ~8-year-old daughter. “Look, from here to the top is just the same distance from our house to Joe’s home. This is just like a taking walk to see your friend, Joe.” And off they went. Finally after a while, I built up enough courage to start my journey, only to rest on a rock 10 minutes later in complete fear. A passer-by saw me, and lent me her hiking sticks. She accompanied me for a solid 20 minutes, walking on the outer edge of the cliff. “Look, I am walking over here and I did not fall.” She said. “Trust your body. It’s all in your head.” Step by step, I made it to the top, with the help of her hiking sticks. The top was so foggy that I couldn’t see a thing, even when I was face to face with Mount Rainier. Didn’t stop it from being the most memorable hike in the entire trip. People were so kind with so much help along the way, and I learned to overcome my fear.
Adventures with friends:
We went through so many adventures together: dealing with no water at a motel due to lack of rain; packing up and changing places every four days; making work calls on a ranch with cows mooing in the background; baking a ton in order to use up 25 lbs of berries we picked over a weekend; and soaking in an outdoor hot tub when watching stars. The ups and bottoms were both more fun because I was with friends - we were able to laugh off our unfortunate incidents because we were in this together, and the breathtaking views on our trip became a background for enabling deeper connections amongst ourselves. 10/10.

We Always Recover

Starting the second half of the year, I spent a lot of time in various illnesses. I had bronchitis in June, followed by a herniated disk and an eye infection. Then all of a sudden in August, I developed an abnormal heart rate that would leave me out of breath after climbing just a short flight of stairs- this went on for more than a month.

Being sick is not fun, especially when you are still young, and everyone around you have always been healthy. It is sometimes disheartening to see why you have been so unlucky to get hit with all your illness, while it seems like everyone else has been able to have all the fun they’d like to have. Then there are doubts both externally and internally about your living habits - have you been eating poorly, doing no exercise, and not sleeping well, otherwise why are you so prone to getting sick? Lastly, there is dealing with the uncertainty of what we don’t know yet in science - that some of these symptoms and causes are currently unexplainable and still a mystery. All of these make you feel very much alone a lot of the time.

While I am still on my journey of healing, I remind myself that in the end we always recover, and we need to have faith in nature. To some extent, my body always performed much better than I thought, and I was always amazed by my body’s healing power. No matter how negative the initial shock was, and how unpredictive my recovery originally seemed to be, my body always made solid improvements day by day, then suddenly, it seemed to be a distant memory from my painful days.

I also developed much more humility and empathy to people who are in other more serious illness - cancer, diabetes, etc. I could not imagine how much bravery they had for going through such difficulties. And I will never “secretly” think someone getting sick is simply a result of “their own fault”, that they were “not taking care of themselves enough”. No one should be blamed for getting sick, and all we should do is to try our best to empathize their pain and struggles.

In some way, maybe the past half a year is a blessing in disguise. I was able to learn much more about medicine, and I developed these illness relatively young, providing me with strong outlook for recovery. Now when my friends and family get sick, I would be able to better understand how they’re feeling, and will be there for them in a better way.

All in all

And that concludes my 2021. It was filled with a lot of surprising twists and turns, and it taught me a lot about humility, resilience and faith. How was your 2021?

Happy New Year!