The life-changing magic of being violently humbled 

So turns out I was too busy experiencing serotonin winter 2022 to pop out my annual woe is me campaign in time to ring in the new year. Love that for me tbh. Astonishingly, a non-zero number of people followed up to ask me about the missing edition which is so extremely flattering you don’t even understand. Because this past winter was full of yet more gallivanting on adventures and because of a secret second reason that will either be revealed to you later in this piece or spoiled completely by the title (I haven’t decided yet), I’m rolling out this year’s blog post 3 months late (or 9 months early, depending on how you look at it). You’re welcome/I’m sorry.

If you’re new here, this is the part of the internet where I feel all my big feelings, of which I have many. If you’re a returning reader, wow you came back after all that last time?

Do not kill the part of you that is cringeworthy, kill the part of you that cringes

Every year I really truly in my heart feel like I’m writing as my best and most introspective, mature self (which I guess in the moment I technically am), and generally feel pretty good about the reflections I put to paper here. This year, I uh made the mistake of going all the way back to my very first rendition to relive all the past feels, which my now fully developed prefrontal cortex (25 hit me like a freight train) can more accurately process as exceedingly cringe. But here’s the thing about cringe: cringing about the past means you’ve changed so much that your thoughts or actions have dramatically improved since the moment you’re cringing about. In fact, the level of cringe is basically directly proportional to the amount of growth. Not cringing about your past self probably actually means that you’ve stayed stagnant rather than learned to improve over a period of time…. or so I tell myself to cope with what would otherwise be debilitating embarrassment about all the shit no one asked me to put online forever. So, without further ado, here’s to this year’s treasure and next year’s trash, aka future cringe fodder!

Do it for the plot 

If you have spent literally any time with me at all in the last five years you will likely be aware of my burning desire to get the fuck out of Vancouver, mostly because I literally never shut up about it. Much to everyone in my life’s relief (of my constant complaining) and after many teary goodbyes, it finally happened! I moved to New York, baby!

With this geo move also came some professional changes: I quit my first big tech job. Leaving Microsoft was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made. Loyal readers of the blog will recall that I grew up in a low-income single parent household, so while my peers’ parents affirmed that they could be or do anything they wanted when they grew up, mine repeatedly reminded me that life is hard, suffering is inevitable, and to not dream too big (to be fair, that was my mother’s lived experience and in this house we believe women). Thus when I made the conscious choice to leave the warm sheltered stability of one of the biggest companies in the world for a smaller, riskier, non-household name during an era of the worst job security of my entire career (*stares directly into camera*), I was pretty apprehensive.  

The second I pulled trig, however, things just started falling into place. First, my long-time relocation goal was to London. I had just started to seriously invest in the job search there when this opportunity fell into my lap, and I was worried that a pit stop in New York would risk the timeline for the UK under 30 visa. But the day after I signed the offer, I found out the age limit had been extended to 35, so I had time. Next, I was bummed about not being able to transfer to New York with Microsoft. But the week after I signed, I found out that my comp would have been lower with the transfer than with the new job. Then, after hearing countless horror stories about the brutal NY real estate market, I was stressed about where I would live without an American credit score. But within a month, I had a lease signed and sorted on a gorgeous place in an ideal location with an amazing roommate. I’m not a very spiritual person, but it really did feel like the universe was affirming my decision at every turn. 

The other very cool thing was that this new gig was the first job in my entire career that I entered with absolutely zero imposter syndrome. Cue the party kazoos. I knew I’d still have a lot to learn, but unlike any of the 10+ jobs I’d had before, I had finally built a sufficient professional track record to fuel 100% confidence that I deserved to be there and would ultimately be fully capable of doing a good job. I had a genuinely enjoyable anxiety-free recruit process for the first time ever, got along with all my interviewers, killed my take-home case, and when the offer came, I was wholly unsurprised. 

Every single step of my tech career so far has felt like a giant fluke: my first marketing project at the-fashion-company-that-shall-not-be-named getting scrapped due to geopolitical tensions (no I’m so serious) resulting in my restaffing onto an SAP implementation and inadvertently launching my foray into tech; a local tech darling taking a chance to hire me way above level; not to mention the flukiest fluke of them all: landing in big tech over a dumb little Twitter joke. Upon describing my awe at this series of inexplicably fortunate events last summer, a former manager-turned-friend replied that maybe once is luck—repetition is a pattern. I’m starting to realize that while perhaps privilege and luck have played a role in the frequency in my life of the right places intersecting with the right times, I ought to credit myself for working very hard for a very long time to land in the right places such that I was ready to leap when the right times came. 

Embrace Plot Twists 

So everything was going absolutely swimmingly for like several consecutive months (loyal readers will recall that I had only recently emerged from my Covid depression cocoon so this was kind of a big deal), when obviously it was time for the powers that be to drop the other shoe. Just as I was finally feeling settled in my exciting new life, disaster struck. 

After three months of riding the highs of stellar performance feedback, unprecedented absence of imposter syndrome, and finally figuring out the American healthcare system, I……… got laid off. Dun dun dun. 

It came as a shock; I was smack in the middle of running a high vis high impact project and doing a pretty good job of it if you believed my manager, which I did, when I logged into our weekly 1:1 to find HR in the meeting too. And that was that on that. Was it rude* of them to lure me away from my big tech safety net and move me all the way to America, only to fire me right before Christmas, leaving me without healthcare and at risk of deportation? Yes. But sometimes it do be like that and this, kids, is why we are never loyal to a corporation. Because despite my hiring manager’s assurances during recruit that the company was in a strong financial position and had practiced slow intentional hiring to avoid this very situation, they didn’t hesitate to drop me or countless other colleagues the second leadership felt the whim. In love and capitalism, you’ve always got to look out for yourself babes, because a corporation sure as fuck won’t. 

Mind you, while this was all going on, I also had to pack my whole life into storage and move out of my apartment, on account of evil evil New York landlords raising our rent to a rate that I wasn’t confident I could afford without a new job secured. Luckily, a new friend was willing to do me several solids and sublet his place to me in weekly increments for what ended up being almost two months while his travel plans expanded, but my housing situation was nevertheless precarious as I simultaneously job-hunted and lease-hunted with little concept of what my budget would be. 

You may recall my once crippling fear of being homeless and unemployed that plagued the first three years of my undergrad. ICYMI and/or TLDR, to illustrate that poverty is largely a societal failure rather than a personal failure, my first year Sociology prof showed us a video in which a series of homeless people held up signs along the lines of “I have a PhD but got hooked on opiods after an injury” or “I used to be an investment banker but fell into financial ruin after an economic crisis”. The point of the video was supposed to be that poverty could happen to anyone, so don’t judge. My personal takeaway as an 18 year old (with a thoroughly uncooked brain incapable of processing nuance) was that I, Yuna Wang, was personally at high risk of being homeless and unemployed. 

So here I was, 10 years on from the inception of that fear, for all intents and purposes, homeless and unemployed. 

Ok I’m so sorry that was saur dramatic. 

Obviously this was not in any way a real homelessness situation and I’m not trying to trivialize the severity of that experience. But it felt ironic in the best way that when this fear that spent the better part of 3 years occupying a significant portion of my brainspace ultimately materialized, I was the most ready I’d ever been to receive it. I had enough savings banked from just 3 months of working in the States to sustain me for several more months, a network of couches in the city on which to crash if my sublet fell through, a passport that permitted me to hang around despite the loss of my work visa, and most importantly, just enough newfound self-confidence that I’d figure it all out to hold the Menty Bs at bay. My new takeaway, for which I hope my therapist is proud of me (normal and realistic goal as per uge), is that all of my deepest fears are surmountable; that no goal I set is inherently unattainable; that I have the skills and resources at my disposal to overcome any challenge I will encounter in this life. 

*for the record, aside from my unceremonious firing (which to be clear was like, extremely awful), I have nothing else negative to say about this company. I had a lovely time with lovely people for the short while I was there, and despite how everything played out, still would have made the choice to send it again.  

The villain origin story to redemption arc pipeline

Normally, when bad things of this scale (or even minor inconveniences if we’re being honest) happen to me, I experience visceral physical symptoms. You know, knotted stomach pit, tight chest, sleep-blocking anxiety. But this time around, I was shockingly… fine? And you know I’m telling the truth because I have never shied away from melodrama here on The Blog™. I was with Grace in Toronto when I got the news, and my reaction was—to my own great surprise—very neutral. I figured I was just in shock or maybe caught up in the whirlwind of the visit and that the symptoms would strike the second I got home. But then I got home and was confoundingly still fine. And I continued to be almost eerily fine through the entire process. 

It’s no secret that the tech industry has been tumultuous. I’ve witnessed countless layoffs and even survived a few over the last two years. Friends far more talented and hardworking than me have fallen victim before me through no fault of their own, so when my time came I knew not to take it as any kind of reflection of my competence. And when I told my friends I wasn’t worried about them even a little bit because I knew they’d land somewhere amazing, I meant it with my whole chest. So when it was their turn to say they weren’t worried about me, I knew to believe them wholeheartedly.

Through rejection after rejection in my months-long new job search, I knew that I would be fine and I would figure it out, because I had a track record of being fine and figuring things out. It felt like a preordained stress test of all the systems I’d built over time to scaffold my self esteem and finally decouple my identity and self-worth from my professional life; and to my happy bewilderment, I passed with flying colours. I’m chalking it up to my years-long carefully titrated cocktail of therapy, inconsistent prescription and self-medication, community-derived support and serotonin, and of course, that juicy juicy full-grown prefrontal cortex. 

Before you’re too impressed, I did consider posting this around my typical cadence +/- around last year-end. However, ego didn’t permit me to publicize my most vulnerable moment without securing the redemption arc first. So because literally no one asked I’m sure you’re all just dying to know, after travelling to three countries in three months, viewing 20+ apartments, and spending what feels like One Thousand hours in Zoom interviews, I’m thrilled to share that I’ve signed a new lease in Chelsea and I’m joining Academia.edu as their newest Senior Product Manager. Resume the party kazoos!

All’s well that ends well

Despite the objective chaos of the past year, this post somehow came out the most self-congratulatory of all—which is saying a lot considering I once wrote 3000 words on being valedictorian (see above section on cringe). But while this may make me increasingly insufferable to others, to me it’s a testament to the work I’ve put in to improve my mental health.

Not me espousing the joys of separating identity from work and then spending this entire post so far only talking about work. Let’s move on to the rest of my life. 

Before deciding to move, my last time in New York was when I was 14 and I remember very little of it. So I came in pretty blind, but it’s been more than I could even imagine. I’m eating so good (my restaurant list exceeds over 300 spots as of the publication of this blog) and seeing and doing a veritable buffet of shiny exciting shit. People are cooler than cool; everyone seems to have side projects or personal goals going on beyond work—not for the hustle but for the passion. They’re creative and inspired and smart and have all the opportunity the world has to offer laid out before them—and they’re not taking it for granted. At the risk of sounding cornier than even I can tolerate, it’s magical to be surrounded by this energy and I get the hype: New York is pretty fucking special. And despite all the drama and street trash and subway rats, I’m so grateful to get to have a little era here. Can’t wait to bore everyone with my big city superiority complex when I get back to Van. 

Speaking of Vancouver, I also got the chance to sneak back for a hot second to apply for my new visa and catch up with some old friends along the way. After the chaos of the last quarter, it was exactly what the doctor (would have) ordered (had I had healthcare in America) to ground me ahead of starting this next chapter. Several of them even, unprompted and independently, shared with me improvements they’d made to their lives that they had learned from me—I was deeply humbled to hear of my impact and I thought I’d share here with y’all as well. 

One friend has been #influenced to shower at night before bed rather than in the morning (objectively superior, why would you want to spend 8 hours marinating in the filth sweat and grime of the day in the sheets you definitely don’t wash more than once a week if even that) and also to prioritize work life balance, which is maybe the more important one. They are lucky enough to work in a field about which they were extremely passionate, but their emotional investment in the job often led them to work up to double the hours they were paid for. With my example and encouragement, setting strong boundaries with both themselves and their team has dramatically improved their quality of life and in fact allowed them to perform even better when they are working. 

Inspired by my carefree frolicking in Mexico despite unemployment, another friend booked a trip to Mexico for a loved one who had also been laid off which, after a few weeks of wallowing, helped their mental and emotional state immensely. I’d long touted the outsized benefits of taking a little trip or treating yourself or administering at least some form of extra self-care when in a rut (not groundbreaking and yet people still don’t do it), so I was thrilled to see that realized for them as well. And, after watching me quit a toxic job and emerge not only unscathed but catapulted to far greater heights, this friend has realized that they’re also allowed to remove themselves from environments that don’t serve them, including quitting multiple jobs, and has landed somewhere even better each time.

Another friend has, after several voice notes back and forth practicing how to reject unwanted situations without the obligation of kindness to those who don’t deserve it, learned how to consistently stand up for herself (gender reveal this time because this is obviously a largely female problem) in both personal and professional settings. Together, we’ve explored the notion of “No” as a complete sentence and how being direct is not synonymous with disrespect.

I could not be more delighted that these have been some takeaways of knowing me. All other trials of life feel so insignificant compared to knowing the people I love are better off for having me in their lives—for their impact on me is immeasurable and (despite a lifelong commitment to trying) impossible to fully reciprocate. While the tone of this blog (especially regarding my views on labouring under capitalism) has drastically changed over the years alongside my own personal evolution, the one constant has been my gratitude to the people in my corner. Their steadfast friendship through my most obnoxious eras and their unwavering faith in my ability to overcome challenges and their generous cheerleading to pursue my wildest dreams have propelled me into this life that is far more beautiful and rich and precious than I could ever have even dared to imagine. And, aside from one more life update that I think I’ll hang on to until next year (we love a cliffhanger), I cannot think of a better note on which to wrap up this year’s extra long rendition (in my defense, we’re catching up after quite the hiatus) than gratitude—for my people, and for you for making it all the way to the end.