I am going to preface this by saying an outright truth: I have no personality. Unfortunately, I missed the formative phase of my life somewhere between developing object permanence and adolescent scoliosis that must have been crucial for me to gather tangible personality traits aside from my present distinctive ones of: not enjoying The Office, and attending Yale. Nevertheless, I am adaptive and refuse to accept that I have peaked. Throughout my adolescence, I’ve lived vicariously through characters from movies. My outright hobbies are independent cinema and good soundtracks, sometimes with ulterior motives. This in part, is due to my bad habit of adopting hyperfixations (attributed to my self-diagnosis of bipolar disorder from a Tumblr post in 2014) and fear of discovering that I do not actually have an identity.
chia was fifteen
I recently shared a project for a video class from last semester on Twitter. Navigating girlhood through the internet, I realized much of my maturation occurred online. (This not being a good thing, clearly.) Coincidentally, I first showed it off to the general public in a place where it could rest as another permanent artifact of the internet.
Play Chia was Fifteen (PC)
(chiaski.com/fifteen) Best experienced on PC, these three parts were also intended to be some sort of installation — but it’s also quite navigable in this web format.
It’s interesting to think about the current generations condemned to live and die on the internet. Making this, I thought a lot of Nina Freeman’s Cibele and vewn’s kittykat96. Both pieces explored blurs between reality and the online — but my experience didn’t really have that. There was a distinct boundary, and I chose to live the life I had online. I learned about the world there, found most of my friends on there to the point where I spent years talking to them through chat instead of ever conversing in real life. They were two distinct spheres and my memory only ever rests on the one left on the internet. My relationships were birthed and then killed through exchanged words, and I’ve written endless letters to dozens of people that will never be seen — that I can never talk to in-person.
As an effect, I could trace my being through cables and screens. It’s infinitely surreal and til this day, I’m convinced that I cannot be myself without this dimension. Not only was it formative, but it was where I continued to exist in. This is something I’ve taken a long time to cope with; the fact that the online did not only inform my experience but was where they all were lived out scares me. I feel this constant link and debt to it but have yet to settle on whether this is actually a bad thing.
Maybe this is really the product of life today. Perhaps we’ll settle on more narratives that exist only in this space. And for these eighteen years of words I have all the more to come.
chia was fifteen is extremely intimate and a revealing part of myself, but there’s no use in living if you do not say some things at the wrong times. I hope you enjoy, but most dearly do I hope you get to think.
Literal Commitments
I have been having issues with work-life balance, and understanding what to prioritize in my life. Aside from the constantly-shifting mental state that comes with being a teenager, I’m getting accustomed to the bigger picture of things: what it means to seize opportunity, what metrics actually matter, and what it means to learn.
In other words, I dropped my first class. It seems irresponsible, and maybe it is–but it was a computer science 200-level class that was taking upwards of 20 hours each week that I didn’t feel was really rewarding at this point in time. I still fully intend to be a computer science major, but I’m currently embarking on several projects and preparing for what is perhaps the fullest months that Developh will undertake ever since its founding in 2016. I’m engrossed in Philippine politics, and am working with several campaigns that have also affected my sleeping schedule since I’m working around the clock. Over-all, it’s an interesting experience that I think shifting my major classes will be worth for.
There are some things I want to do in exchange:
- Be consistent and persistent with my work at Developh–something that I consistently want to do, but just as frequently have worries about in terms of sustainability, teams, motivation. I am almost certain that the path I’m taking in this little student group is something I want to do for the rest of my life. The greatest thing for me to do would be to constantly build towards it.
- Make at least one commit a day, I’ve lost so much of the dev energy I’ve had in previous summers and it’s impacted my excitement for code. I’ve been getting into this for the past week, and the feeling of it as a passion rather than just as an obligation has been returning.
- Get serious about studying computer science as I’ve picked up the holy grail textbooks, and am looking things up in advanced for classes that I’m excited to take. Another version of this is that I’m relearning things with my current stack (since I’m still functionally operating at the knowledge I had when Web 2.0, shiny gradient-filled [not the lava lamp kind, but the bevel and emboss kind] were still a thing), learning more things about full-stack development, taking lead, and actually putting into action agile dev practices. I’m also immersing myself more in a broader dev community and it’s making me really, really happy.
- Write. I had an attempt at a weekly goal, which didn’t work out–so now I’m trying for at least twice a month. I have a huge backlog of videos I want to edit, film in need of putting together, design that I want to make just for me, and words I have to put out that are eagerly there and waiting, especially for the angst to transfer onto a more creative and expressive outlet as opposed to my papers.
- Understand why I believe in the things I do, which is a really convoluted thing. I’m bad at admitting the faults of the people I follow but easy to shoot my own belief down. There are thoughts that swim around my head that never get out because they deviate from the conversations and networks I choose to immerse myself in, and I have a habit of conforming and viewing these sociopolitical/ethical thoughts as bad of me to consider. I want to get a firmer grasp on things now that I’m more bound to reality than I am specific people, and a big part of that is looking for reason, history, context, and conversation.
- Get a work ethic.
It’s just a small goal of mine to be a type of person that I can view as objectively good (as much as possible), or someone who just tries. I’m not there yet, and I’m still inconsiderate and abrupt and volatile–but I’m taking these months to think of my actions, the years I have spent in life and what I have ahead of me and the value I put in the uncertainty of knowing. These are times when I need to step out more and understand that life is beyond face-to-face human connection when it’s a dimension that grounds us too much, especially since I’m living in a bubble. There is a greater world I need to see through other’s experiences, the things they’ve decided to write down and show and document for the world that we don’t let ourselves digest as much. There is creation inside of me waiting, I think, and I don’t want to lose sight before eighteen.
Chia