Between Ambitious and Determined Lies Misperception

CoHASS Graduate Conference @ Nanyang Technological University, 2018.

When I was 19 years old, still in my undergraduate program, I always admired people who can deliver keynote presentation in such exact point. I always thought that university would be perfect along with those fruitful discussion everyday and those people who wanted to develop education system, or similar things like that. As time passed by, I saw that things happened actually the opposite. Academic realm is definetly none of those mentioned above.

From where I came from, being a determined woman who aims to get her things done in 'cold hands' or as for example targeting to get PhD in her 27' apart of being married is considered 'different' (even in academic circumstances). I wonder why? I wonder why certain people were transgressing themselves backwards. Why? Let it them be, but why even bothered comparing to others with what they had just to fulfill their insecurity of not being full, You were full, I also was. Could we just stay there, along with each other?

But, now things gradually changed. It was not as severe as I used to remember two years ago.

In other words, I would say that things happened more in the colorful way if I could see more in silver linings. Nontheless knowing what people said this or that, once we knew what we wanted and focusing to get there, we would be alright. Let it there the interpretations in between, we could possibly  harvested it as lesson-learned. People changed, I knew it and I always believed that they would change to be better.

Anyway, I thought, in this point, even after done such things, I would associate myself as those people I admire, but turned out it was just the same. I was still a person as I was in my 19. I was still me, with all my negative talks. I was still the one who admired certain figures and were trying hard to be good example for others. I was still afraid to let others down, I was afraid to fail, to be humiliated, so I alwaysrather gave more than I could receive, because I knew...holding such responsibilites was hard. I learned a lot. Again and again. In this state of mind, I learned to be humble and not easily satisfied with the achievements...

People would only look at the bright things. Now I invited people though this writings to also look closely to the unseen things, the grief, the tears, dissapointment, failure, and heartbreak facing more and more rejections. I learned that a lot from people I admire, they told me to be resilient, to be tough. Because magic did not happen over night, it happened as you made them habit.

Here with me in the picture was the senior I always looked up to, and be in the place where I always wanted to because hell..in NTU, they were considered being 'Ambitious' as normal (even for a woman), in brief, never crossed my mind I would be able to do the same thing. But, look at where I was. No it was not an achievement, it was more like hard work that had been paid off.

Few days ago, I was presenting 'the work' that actually not belong to me (I was only helping a little with frameworks and methodology whilst the two authors work much for the presentation). I barely could not sleep from two weeks earlier. I read everything I could, I was looking everywhere for related reading materials of which hard to find, I was trying building good frameworks to answer the research question. Definitely not an easy hikes. I wised up, in terms of doing research; it would be hard anytime you did it, whether you were undergraduate or graduate. 

Despite of the fact that I finally did what I always wanted, I did not feel doing it quite good enough. I did that awfully, shamefully instead. People would see that as wonderful achievement, of which it was for me. It was an exceptional experience, but still, I could hear something inside me yearning 'How could I be that bad? How could not I be better than this?' Funny how my head was working against me. I realized that, in this point of admiring people, the most important thing was their coping mechanism to the confidence deficiency.

At least, that was in my case. I knew more about those people that are always admired and respected: they were the people who are being resilient. They get up, everytime they fell, every fucking time they failed. They were trying hardly to silence their-self when they started to talk negative about themselves (yes, the hardest part was the negative talk we threw to ourselves). Moreover, they also ambitiously set higher goals regardless what their surrounding talked about them. Sometimes, people would not get it and they put us down by saying those decouraged words, but life is life, right?

Sometimes, all you need to do is willing to learn more by giving the best-est, I was talking the fair effort, or even fairer than you could imagine. Because to learn something new, you have to prepare to wholly understand prior to the given instruction. Humble yourself, know that you know nothing, and put everything to force yourself to find anything related. Like I wrote in other posting, I would end this writing with giving a cheers to the more waking nights in distress because of vary reading list, cheers to more journals, cheers to the paralyzing fear and panic in attempt to talk in front of big audience. Cheers to life!

With love,

ISMOYO Jessy