How to move on from a dream
“The present, we assume, is eternally before us, one of the few things in life from which we cannot be parted.”
— Anuk Arudpragasam in A Passage North
One day, a person—who later became my then supervisor—asked me about the dream that I plan to pursue. It was a simple question yet it made me reflect on the puzzles that I had been assembling for many years. Growing up, the idea of a dream mainly revolves around a noun that is far from eyesight. A dream was supposed to be a grandeur entity that remains untouchable and meets its finish line when the soul and body nearly exceed their optimum capacity. But, what if at a such young age you realized that your dream is no longer feasible?
A few months before I blew the candle of my twenty-fifth birthday, the day that I had been waiting for since I was ten was no longer surreal. For the first time in my life, I knocked on the door of an elite organization profoundly known for its study in the field of environmental policy. My heart pounded. And I asked myself whether this was real or not. Yet, at the same time, I started thinking about the expiration date of a dream.
No longer eighteen
When choosing a career, I was practically not eighteen anymore—the age when I had to commit to a major at the university. Pushing the “commit” button on the web page took less than three seconds, but the consequences that followed could last at least four years. In a span of eight semesters, changes happened. My worldview was no longer the same to the day I entered college.
At work, I learned about the importance of documenting my progress by using a runbook. In principle, the function of a runbook is to record the thinking process of each decision that we, as a team and individual contributors, took. A runbook should also function as a navigation kit when the process is not on the right track. Sadly, in life, there is no single runbook that would tell me the exact pathway of so-called success. Your growth depends on the sources that are within reach, including the circumstance where you pursue your formal education and other privileges that you are entitled to.
Environmental policy is a body of knowledge that attracted me in the most unexpected way. When I read about the concept of carbon trading in a children’s magazine for the first time, I was mesmerized. Nearly five years after that moment, I gave a presentation about carbon trading for my Environmental Studies class in Year 10. In front of my peers, I confidently talked about an idea that I found spectacular while I was still unsure about the real mechanism.
Fifteen years surely did not pass by in the blink of an eye. In between the first exposure to the day I wrote my analysis on carbon trading, various moments happened. I graduated from elementary school. I took my first long-distance swimming training. I did a fieldwork on kampong development for my internship. The days that I spent stitching words, graphs, and appendices of a study on the disbursement mechanisms of protecting the rainforest were actually a limbo until a nightmare struck like a lightning on a bright day: the halt of funding.
The limitation of a decision
I grasped the notion of the limitation of a decision in a Policy Analysis class. The goal of this class was the explore the art and science of decision-making, which is the core activity of social intervention. For a month we discussed the components that form a regression, a method that is commonly used to measure the extent of a public policy’s output. Among the long list of discussion points, what captivated my attention the most was omitted variable bias. It is a condition that occurs when one more relevant variable are exempted from a statistical model. As a result, the model is distorted. That session was then closed with a cliché question: how do we know if the policy measurement we apply is the best or not? I could not remember the exact answer but the gist: “it depends on the time and situation when a policy was decided.”
Years after that series of lectures, I was reminded of a similar takeaway after finishing The Book of Why. In their illustrious work, the mathematician and writers duo—Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie—discussed a topic that I find close to my daily duty: if causation is not correlation, then what is it? Pearl’s writing on correlation and causation could not be separated from his notes on confound variables, a confusion that has come to an end in the twenty-first century.
“Controls give the feeling of specificity, of precision…. But sometimes you can control for too much. Sometimes you end up controlling for the thing you’re measure.”
- Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie in The Book of Why
How absurd it is to avow that statistics has changed from a subject that I tried to avoid to a way that keeps me grounded.
Interestingly, the most indispensable lesson of decision-making comes from my parents’ stories. In the mid-90s they tied the knot. My mother was a rising senior at medical school while my father was a junior lecturer. During the years that were full of uncertainties, they put in their best effort. My father completed his advanced degree in air pollution and later realized that limiting his work in that field would not be enough to survive in a country where the research and development budget is tighter than a regular Barbie doll’s waistline. Later he would still pursue research projects in air pollution while working in areas that are high in demand.
Parenting, as a collective work between the spouses and their respective support systems, has also its own omitted variable and confound biases. When my friends and I entered our mid-20s, consuming popular parenting books was nothing strange. Bit by bit we learn and unlearn various approaches that exist. As a daughter who bonds with her mother through oversharing the details of life, there were times when I quizzed my mother about the things she did in her early years of becoming a parent. To the things that remain imperfect, she admitted that once her knowledge was limited, too, and asked for forgiveness. No matter how many psychology and pediatrics modules she had ever taken, there was a first time for everything outside the isolated classrooms.
When I was trying to distance myself from a role that used to be embedded in me, I reflected on my failure to embrace the limitation. A dream career should not be perceived as a rigid finish line. Instead, it should be a tool that allows me to focus on the process, not the result per se.
Celebrating mundanity and early adulthood
To my younger self, David Nicholls’ One Day was merely about the seasons of friendship and, of course, the spices of romance. But, in my late-20s, re-reading the stories from both Emma and Dexter’s sides unravel the imperfect trifecta of adulting in which one can only opt for two out of three things: money, energy, and time. Your world is slowly drifting apart, but somehow you still manage to hold the pieces that you find essential.
A year after I finished my degree in urban planning, I stumbled upon science communication. At first, it was just an interesting word. Then it made me reflect on another journey that I could endure. In a world full of myriad, I know that making knowledge accessible is my calling, or in other words, a new dream that I want to claim. Fortunately, the process does not stop there. A new chapter awaits. It is turning a dream into action.
Amidst the days of running regression and organizing data architecture, I gradually adapt to a new chapter that runs at a distinctive tempo. My days are mundane but I know how to light up the excitement with small pleasures. I was never emotionally invested in badminton—a sport that is widely celebrated in Indonesia—until a dearest friend invited me for a practice session. Now I am proud to say that I enjoy sharing a few hours of my weekends with them at the court. In addition to attending sport and book club meetings, I am also fond of reconnecting with my old friends by having lunch, visiting a library, or even as silly as sharing an umbrella under a sudden rain. Indeed, getting out of the rabbit hole of social deprivation has significantly transformed me.
If I have to wrap up the key lesson learned of moving to a new field, with no hesitation I would say is staying to my true authentic self that is not bounded by a single title. One can love writing long poetic proses but is paid for doing a 9–5 job that requires hours of coding. On the other hand, one can also devote the same energy to exercising as much as generating sales reports.
Contrary to what I believed in the past, mundanity is not a blocker for personal growth. Mundanity, to some extent, is a sign that everything is at the right portion. At the same time, I embrace the fact that becoming a happy adult requires a support system just like the popular saying of child-raising—it takes a village to raise a child. Navigating adulthood will never be the same without help from other people (uhm, including a therapist).
Regardless of the amount of knowledge that I acquire, my decision on pursuing a dream will remain imperfect. My journey has taught me about redefining a dream that shifts from a noun to a verb. Alas, I am proud to say that my answer to my dream is no longer grandeur yet it is a crème de la crème of things I can endure.
Adulting, my dear, has humbled me in the most unanticipated way.
