Losing Identity, Gaining Wisdom

(This is an excerpt of an article I published on September 24, 2010 on my former blog at oliviahoang.com. I was of a different faith back then, and my blog’s topics reflected that. Here’s a timestamp of that blog from WayBackMachine.)

But it's interesting to me that it also holds true for my conception of what constitutes fun. The Bay Area has a lot of young professionals, and with facebook and meetup groups cropping up, it is easier than ever to find an event to go to on any given night of the week. There are so many young people to meet and talk to when you go to all these parties and mixers. Yet sometimes, when I come back home from an event, I feel like something was vacuumed out of me.

I brought this up in my initial meeting with Jian Ying Shifu, and he explained it to me in a way that really struck me. "It's because you are expending all this energy, but you are not getting anything in return. You don't feel the connection there," he explained. I have no idea how, but this simple sentence, something I myself could have come up with (but didn't), really brought it home to me what the issue was.