2021 - The Butterfly Effect

It’s that time of the year, where people reflect, and either deem the year that’s on its way out a good one, or a bad one. I thought I’d try my hand at at and pen down the things that happened to/with me in 2021, what it taught me, and where I am at the end of it.

It was a year where I had to take big, life-altering decisions, and I say this happily at the end of the year, knowing that my life has been altered for the better :). Everyone in the world has been dealing with the never-ending pandemic that is Covid-19, with its mutations. That can be a separate article where I can say how it changed my life, for the worse, for the better, and everything in the middle. Let me keep that out of this.

When I ushered 2021 in, I was in San Diego, and I had lived there since August 2017; a solid group of friends who I loved and hung out with on the weekends also lived there.  I turned 27 in the beginning of this year, and it was significant for my family, since I had agreed that I would work with them as a team to help find a life-partner for me. The agreement would begin in July however (It was the outcome of an earlier negotiation where we’d start to look when I was 27.5). My family said that they’d get their feet wet without my involvement, and that involved laying some groundwork, creating a profile, figuring out what details they’d need - all this without paying for “premium* profiles online until July came in. 

A couple of days later, a friend of mine who had moved from Qualcomm to Amazon earlier, came home and told me about a role in his team that he thought I’d be a good fit for. I was happy at my job in Qualcomm, and wasn’t actively looking to move. I was comfortable, and reasonably content. It was not perfect, very few jobs are. After I spoke to him, I agreed to just talk to the recruiter about the product and my role. The product seemed very cool to me, so I decided to give it a shot, and decide later. It wasn’t going to be an easy decision to leave San Diego, and all my friends. 

Things moved very quickly for me in a world that was otherwise quite slow (thanks to lockdowns, quarantines, and WFH) and I had an offer by Mid-March. Would I want to move to a new city, make new friends, work at a new place, new industry, different work which I didn’t know much about, albeit a very interesting product space ? I took some time, and decided to do it. All things considered, I was excited to move, to grow, to experience. My professional and personal life were individually changing, and yet, they were going to collaborate in a way I wouldn’t have imagined. 

A couple of months later, I got caught up in webs of stupidity and legality of travel restrictions and even though I was fully vaccinated, I found myself in Mexico for 2 weeks. I was angry, frustrated, but as I often do, I started looking ahead soon after. I had undergone financial and emotional trauma leading up to that point. What was surplus in my personal balance sheet was time, and alone-time at that. My parents proposed that idea of taking a peek at my profile that they had created; and so I opened the app, got the credentials from them and checked it out. I was impressed about how little they had exaggerated my goodness, and how candid they were about my habits. Anyhoo, I digress. I found the love of my life on the app that day, only because of all of these events that led up to it. Butterfly Effect. 

I won’t bore you with the details, but she was going to be in Seattle - where I was going to go once I got back to mainland USA. We got to know each other over the phone first, then met up in California, and then I moved to Seattle.

I made new friends, met up with some old ones, and inherited quite a few from my partner. I warmed up to my new workplace, and the colleagues. Seattle is always bustling, rain or shine. I've experienced rain and shine here now, and I love the shine, and also the rain, for the most part. I'd like to write about Seattle when I complete a year's stay here, so let's put a pin in that. For now, Seattle has been beautiful for all the people that it has, along with some stunning beauty that the mountains bring to it. It had always been home (outside of Bangalore) to my fiancé, so I had a lovely tour guide. 

In September, I asked her if she'd marry me (she said YES), and in October, we got ceremonially engaged! 

I am extremely fortunate to have been the in right and wrong places at the right and wrong times. All of this reminds me of a saying in Kannada: “aadaddella vaLite aayitu” that translates to “whatever happens, happens for the good”. Now this might not objectively be true - but I find this to be the most practical school of thought, given that whatever happens is immutable, and we can’t change the past. When we believe that, we can focus our energies into what can be, and strive to make that the best. That’s my takeaway from 2021 - and if I can consciously adopt this to across aspects, I believe I can optimize for happiness, and low stress in 2022 - and that is my resolution.