Changes Are For Good

I quit my current job this past Wednesday, typing up a neat resignation letter to my boss and friend, among the usual noise outside my office made by people I don't like, which I can dismiss now since I won't have to endure it much longer.

My personal stuff remain unpacked in a box from last moving, for I know this departure is coming.

The idea striked me only in early March.

Last time I tried to leave is around end of 2002, when I was counter offered by my then Boss, and the Bank I was going to is not sponsoring Greencard anyway, so I stayed, and I stayed to fall in love.

After a month of vigorous interviews and anxiously waiting, sacrificing my trip to Spain, 5 years since my last attempt, I was finally able to leave this job, March 26th is the date when I CAN leave, all complicated immigration rules, and I called it quit on Apr 11.

I made sure the big and sunny office they were trying to move me in was given to someone I care for and try to protect, my former mentor.

I am calm in the most unexpected way, for this change in life.

My boss's boss summoned me immediately to his office, there are many reasons for me to leave, but I am not obligated to disclose, some reasons are dear to me only.

But the point is "It is not about whether I am leaving or not, it is about where I am leaving this to." I answered at his inquiry. "It is not you or this company, it is me." Gush it feels good to say it.

"You were overlooked (That word does not makes me happy at all for a nacissist like me) in the past. You were making awful money for your level and skill and what you bring to the table, I am giving you what you deserve, I ask you to stay."

"You don't have to do that. I need a change of scene after 8 years. I hope you don't feel offeneded if that won't change my mind."

"But if I don't do anything, you will just leave."I smiled at him without saying anything.

It won't change my mind, although I appreciate his trying. I don't even have to wait for the terms. It is not about that. I don't have to be part of a company that has lost its direction and care for its people.

And there is no price tag big enough for that freedom to leave something I don't love or believe in anymore.

To not having that freedom before is such a torture. For any future greencard applicants, please take the marriage route intead of the work route, fake marraige is especially recommended due to its flexibility, it is never good to be bounded to one work place, one company for so long, it is against human right.

To think that I had to go through this in the most free country of the world is itself a good satire, yet I love this country still.

But I am not being ungrateful. I also face up to the truth that we are limited by where we come from and our own perspective with life, like I need a greecard, like I was not happy with where I was.

I did not lost a parent at young age, but was always on the verge of it, always lived with fear. I grew up in the society where it discards its cultural heritage of respect and kindness, and people lose their faith and trust between each other being constantly crushed by the cold system imported from the wrong side of the West.

While I was stuck with this company becuase of greencard, I can not lose the job for a day, I was scared and frsutrated. Negativity was my jewelry. And I was stuck in a very unhappy co-dependecy marriage for too long, something I never talked about on this blog.

I was in a well in life for a long time, sad, scared and unhappy, too weak to get out, which I coverd up under a gracious and vivacious mask. Then I got to know D better, when I suddenly know I could be happy. It does not have to be denied or deprived of. And he became a savior of my misery, but no one should be a savior or can be one forever, and misery do not deserve company. He should only be loved well.

In this transforming time, I have been trying to find a meaning for life, wit and laughter in small things, like freedom, like love out of heart, like being honest and brave, in books and in writtings, in newly found freindships, in saying goodbye and mean it, healings in reflections and knowing that the only real reconnection can only happen after we are happier with ourselves.

My new job will continue to be in this industry which I landed upon by accident, a industry pretty notorious for its manipulative nature. What I do is suppose to make it more efficient, meausure everything with significance.

At least I got to work with the new toy, the online space. As a blogger, I am fascinated with the way this medium makes us connect or disconnect, or make us feel we are in control in what we consume, instead we might be just bombarded in a different way. But I like the democratic nature of it, I like everything democratic.

For as long as I am going to have to do it, I promise myself I will have fun with it.

And I want to be a good writer, a good story teller. I want to write for strangers who share love for words, whom I never know or never will meet, I want to write so that things that touches my life may also touch others. Writing is a way of living for many of us, like singing or dancing or painting for many others.

I hope to write in the two languages that has made me me. In exchanging using those languages, I exchange my identify from the past and the one to the future, in the old land of home and the new land of freedom. I carry them both, I speak them both when making love.

Among the changes in my life and its moving pieces, working and interviewing and getting the tax paid and missing D and my family far away, I encountered several good writers, whose story touched my soul. Both of them are of my age, they had different vocations as writer, but they switched when they can.

I will also work with artists friends for an idea of opening an gallery in Beijing, it will house my favorite photographes and drawings from Contemporary Chinese artists to start with, to share something memorable and created from heart.

So I can change too. I don't have to follow the known path or be single layered.

And all changes start somewhere small, like a resignation from this company, like throwing off clothes from several seaons ago, like changing a routine of getting breakfast from the same place every day.

Everyone of us, at every corner of our ride of this journey, when we decides where to go next, we don't have a GPS guide, all we have is some courage to continue, some curiosity to know, some loved ones we keep in our heart, and some hope to be happy.

And the fact that we know we can make the call, even within certain limitation, is fulfilling in itself.

So I quit and this is for good, I don't even have to be convinced.