Do what you love to do.
This is quite a humble and personal post on what I have learnt throughout my life and how I get to this stage at the age of 31.
I am incredibly fortunate that right now I am in a great place that I never thought I would be. The future? I don’t think about that any more as I am enjoying today as I am typing up this post dreaming what I could provide, make, do. Every day is never the same.
When I was growing up, I was a quiet and timid child because of my deafness that I rarely talk about because I didn’t think about it at all. Attending school was quite tiring but stuck at it somehow. I made and lost friends over the school years because that is how you start to learn about your own make up of character. I suffered from being bullied at school throughout middle school up to the end of high school.
I made sure that I kept going without giving up. Sometimes I was alone in class and during breaks but that didn’t stop me from dreaming things that I want to do as I knew I am bright with tremendous and inspirational energy.
At first, I love working with computers, it was an escape for me because I love how they tick, how did it work from start to finish. I talked so much about the Internet in 1997 because it was to me a huge thing that you can go online, chat to people, surfing websites, reading up news, etc (yahoo was the no.1 search engine back then!). I fell into learning more about web design and coding while geeking out in Linux.
What I didn’t know that it had set me up a decade in IT and loved every moment of it. I was hired by School of Mathematics at the University of East Anglia as their only IT technician. From there, my strengths in working with just a handful of UNIX workstations and server, meeting new people was amazing. And I got introduced to my first Mac and the world of Apple.
As time went on, I was longing to be creative yet I didn’t know where to start. I had only one camera which was the Canon IXUS 400 that I had for years and bought a Canon DSLR 400D to explore more about photography.
At the beginning of 2008, I had a mental lapse where I didn’t take care of myself and that when I went through a breakdown colliding moving to a new location and new job. I had a health assessment and they found out that I was suffering from anxiety for many years.
Nobody nor myself knew what would had happened and to this very day, it is like hitting the reset button in my head and start learning everything all over again. Taking anti-anxiety medication was something to take allowing myself to feel ‘free’. It didn’t stop there because I had to deal with what my mind, body and soul was telling me.
I turned to creativity to type, draw, take photos, experiment with designing, getting obsessed with details. Before I knew it, people were praising me what I was doing. I went along with this and with a hint from my parents “Go out more, say yes more… just go and do it”.
Over the years, I slowly came off the medication as I was ready to learn and deal with anxiety again. It took a couple of years until I was completely off it. It is an amazing feeling that I got there with tremendous support from my close ones.
I have done so many things since that moment, all the ‘yeses’ was going somewhere and before I knew it, I met my beautiful and loving wife. With her alongside on my journey, she has been actively encouraging me to carry on being creative, inspire people with design, thoughts and talk utter nonsense because it all leads somewhere.
That ‘somewhere’ opens more doors and possibilities.
Do what you love to do and embrace it.