My last post was in Jun 2023 and to be honest, I did not expect my next post to be in Apr 2025, about 22 months later. Sure, I took a very bad hit financially in 2022 and was struggling to recover in 2023. I thought it was going ok so I’m now wondering what in the world happened then and after that, to make me stop blogging for almost 2 years. FYI, I considered letting the absence hit 2 years before announcing a comeback in Jun 2025 but decided it was a ridiculous idea. Mainly because that may result in me disappearing for another 2 years. Haha.
Actually, come to think about it. I’m starting to remember what happened during that period of time. Our younger boy was not in preschool then because we opted not to put him in infant care so we could get more time with him. Similar to what we did with our older boy. The big difference was that it was fully WFH for us due to Covid with our older boy but by the time it came to our younger boy, we were starting to WFO more. So we had to do a lot more schedule juggling. And our younger boy was falling sick a lot because he was exposed to what our older boy was getting from preschool. Then, we both entered into rough patches of work at around the same time that required long hours and plenty of fire-fighting both in the office and at home. Ahhh, it’s coming back to me now.
Such a pity really that I stopped blogging. With time, I start to realise how these life experiences can be useful to others. Whether as a guide or warning on what can happen to a person’s life when you lead it this way. If sharing can help others to avoid making the same mistakes as you or help them consider making some improvements in their lives, wouldn’t it be worth doing so?
Anyway, I’m not sure whether I’m back but I do feel like I’m in a better headspace compared to Jun 2023. It’s true that as long as you keep yourself alive and fighting, things do get better over time. But only if you survive, a caveat I must add. If you get knocked down and stayed down, it can be difficult to come back and life can really go to shit. There’s no secret to surviving, you just try to get up on time, forget about everything that is going wrong with your life and improve on something you screwed up the day before. And before you sleep on time, think about what you didn’t do well for that day and make a mental note to do something about it the next day. It can be how you manage your family, job, business, yourself in anything – attitude, behaviour, performance, finances, etc. Most of the time, I was failing to do this properly. Woke up late, felt like crap, went through the motion, slept late. Incredibly vicious and negative life cycle to break out of. This is not a success story because that’s why I said try to do it.
But given enough time, about 22 months to be exact, you realise all that bad effort still translated into something useful. Just imagine, even with minimal effort and feeling like you are useless most of the time, it still amounted to something. You just have to give it sufficient time to take hold. I don’t have an inspiring story to share about how resilient I was. But I do have a realistic story about how practical I was. I think there’s value in sticking around even after getting knocked down. How you try to recover, all the tricks/hacks you try to use or habits your try to build/kick. Even if they don’t work for you, they may work for someone else.
I mean, my main focus is still going to be writing about finances. After all, it’s in the name of my blog. But I want to write more about the life learnings around it. How small decisions at critical times actually lead to the biggest impact on your life. Learning to recognise when you are in one of those moments, to be aware that what you decide on at that point could very well change the trajectory of your life. Has to be one of my most important takeaways from my absence. So, let’s see whether this lasts. Or will I disappear again for who knows how long the next time?
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