June 2026: Standing Still in Shifting Sands, Searching for Solid Ground

June 2026, Week 1.

I started the month with a heavy heart and an exhausted mind.

I had already burned through most of my fuel trying to stay proactive with my capstone work, and finally, we received the much-awaited clarity on the semester end date and the deliverables. It looked like we had already made a head start on one of them; the technical report, which would be common for the entire team. We also needed to prepare a presentation deck and a video.

For the common deliverables, I had taken the initiative at first and prepared the initial draft. But that was far from being done. There were rounds of feedback from both my batchmates and our professor, and every revision seemed to uncover ten more things to fix.

After being bedridden for a couple of days, I honestly didn’t know how I was going to power through the last few days of the semester; the final stretch of my three-year-long journey. Since I couldn’t afford to take any more time off, I shifted my focus back to work for a couple of days.

Unfortunately, work wasn’t exactly a refuge either.

I have been collaborating with another team for the last one and a half months. Initially, it seemed promising, but recently I’ve felt more and more like I’m being pushed around.

The team comes up with a new proposal every week, and while every proposal should ideally involve healthy discussions before reaching a conclusion, all my arguments are dismissed almost instantly, often without proper justification. And the people who seem “fairly convinced” by my reasoning before the meeting somehow remain silent during the actual discussion, while I make increasingly futile attempts to prove my point.

I’m not sure whether it’s company politics, some invisible memo that I keep missing, or simply my own ego refusing to let go, but I no longer enjoy engaging in these discussions. They call it a “discussion,” but it always ends up with me accepting whatever they want.

During the weekdays, I stepped back from the capstone work and let my teammates take the lead. However, I still needed to plan my travel for the convocation.

For three years, I had imagined taking my parents to the graduation ceremony and showing them around my beautiful college campus. But now I find myself facing one of life’s harsher realities; I simply cannot afford to take my whole family on this trip.

I am reminded of the song: “Money, money, money… must be funny… in a rich man’s world…”

As the weekend arrived, I focused on packaging up the entire semester’s work and getting the submission done. At that point, completion mattered far more than perfection.

June 2026, Week 2.

I felt a little relieved after submitting everything, but unfortunately, my overthinking mind had no intention of letting me enjoy that relief.

There were still a few days left before the deadline, but honestly, keeping important assignments for weekdays feels like gambling. Work may appear uneventful and mundane, but all it takes is one ad-hoc request or one escalation for the entire plan to collapse.

And if I’m being realistic, I can’t trust my own health either.

So finishing the work over the weekend, a few days ahead of the deadline, felt like the safest option.

This week, I also started going to the office again to fulfill my punch-in requirements. Despite all the disappointments, lack of growth, and lack of opportunities, I still work diligently. That’s probably the only way I know how to be at peace with myself; knowing that I have given my all.

What I don’t know is how to give my body and mind the deep rest they have been craving for months while also working every weekday and spending several hours commuting.

I watched a couple of K-dramas 1 episode a night, although I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to sustain that pace.

Towards the end of the week, we all found ourselves waiting anxiously for our grades.

One last time.

June 2026, Week 3.

At the beginning of the third week, we finally received our grades.

I had no complaints about this semester’s results. But when I calculated my overall course CGPA, I felt a familiar kind of disappointment.

At the beginning of this journey, I had set an ideal CGPA target for myself. Something along the lines of: “I should at least achieve this much.” But after my grades dropped significantly in a couple of subjects during the second year, I quietly abandoned that goal.

I told myself:

“Maybe it’s too ambitious. I’m not a full-time student anymore. I’m not as young or energetic as I once was. My body and mind have aged in ways that don’t exactly favor learning things quickly. So I’ll simply show up every day, do the best that I can, and stop punishing myself for not being perfect.”

The irony is that my final CGPA ended up very close to that original goal.

Very close.

And yet, it still fell slightly short.

My grades are objectively far above average, but somehow that didn’t stop me from feeling sad about missing the target by such a narrow margin.

It’s funny.

This is almost exactly what happened during my graduation as well.

To snap myself out of it, I reminded myself how far I have come. Maintaining even the same level while balancing work, health, and life should be considered an achievement in itself.

But sometimes logic simply fails to comfort emotions.

This week, I also spent most days in the office.

The discussions about moving me out of my current project continued. My supervisors have been looking for a junior engineer to replace me, while I would move to a larger team.

When I first heard about it, my anxiety skyrocketed.

Eventually, I managed to calm myself with a simple thought:

“Whatever happens, most of it is outside my control.”

Instead of exhausting myself over an uncertain future, I tried to bring my focus back to the present and continued working on my deliverables.

Towards the end of the week, I interviewed candidates for the recruitment drive.

Unfortunately, most candidates seemed either underprepared or determined to act oversmart. Meeting genuinely smart candidates always lifts my mood. Dealing with the opposite has precisely the opposite effect.

Otherwise, the weekend remained fairly uneventful.

I still haven’t resumed my evening walks. The rain has been coming and going throughout the second half of the week.

June 2026, Week 4.

The final week of the month pushed me right to the edge.

Whether that will eventually turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know yet.

For my graduation, I still needed to complete a long list of clearances. While I wasn’t physically running around departments carrying a folder full of documents, the virtual version of the process wasn’t exactly easy either.

There were bugs on the college website, confusion regarding policies and points of contact, and the usual delays when trying to communicate with administrative authorities through email.

Interestingly, our batch group chat suddenly came back to life after almost a year.

For the last two semesters, we had all been working separately under different professors, so there wasn’t much to discuss collectively. But now that we’re finally nearing graduation, everyone is scrambling to complete the final formalities while simultaneously managing work and family responsibilities.

At work, meanwhile, the waves kept getting rougher.

At the beginning of the week, I had to attend a client interview with almost no time to prepare. Soon afterward, I learned that the role was only partially aligned with my preferred skill set.

Then, almost immediately, I got selected.

The problem was that my current team hadn’t even agreed to release me yet.

I tried very hard to see this as an opportunity. But strangely, the more information I gathered, the less appealing the entire situation looked.

For a while, I remained silent because I genuinely didn’t know whether this sudden shake-up might eventually work out in my favor.

But eventually, I spoke up.

Some people cheered me on.

“Bravo! You go, girl! You have every right to stand your ground.”

Others dismissed my concerns with responses that felt superficial at best.

I’ve realized that even a supposedly “less stressful” job can become an absolute nightmare because of the people involved, conflicting interests, and fundamentally different ways of thinking.

By the end of it all, I just felt lonely, exhausted, and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of toxicity around me.

At some point, all I could do was pray for things to somehow get better.

Other Highlights of the Month

Know Your Mushrooms.

This month, I started experimenting with some low-effort baking ventures again.

I baked milky mushroom heads with pizza toppings, and everyone loved them. This was actually my first time seeing milky mushrooms, let alone cooking with them.

In one of my Amazon orders, I accidentally bought two bags of “Mint Seasoning Powder” instead of “Dry Mint Leaves Powder.” Towards the end of the month, we decided to put that mistake to good use and whipped up another side dish using the mint seasoning, some garlic seasoning (that came as a free sample with the actual mint leaves powder that I eventually ordered), along with chopped cabbage, onions, crinkle-cut carrots, and milky mushrooms.

That recipe was an absolute killer.

Button mushrooms are my least favorite at the moment, although I don’t mind them on baked toasts or chow mein.

It’s only been a few months since we started having oyster mushrooms at home as well, so I suppose we’re slowly entering our mushroom era.

Trying Moringa Leaves

We also tried moringa leaves for the first time.

Mum made crispy patties using fresh moringa leaves and just enough ground lentils to hold them together.

From being a picky eater who trusted nothing except potatoes to willingly trying all kinds of vegetables… I’ve truly come a long way.

K-Drama Binge of the Month

This month’s K-drama binge was genuinely enjoyable:

Hospital Playlist (Season 2),
Hierarchy,
Crash Course in Romance,
Marry My Husband,
Move to Heaven, and
Navillera.

I’m glad that I’ve slowly started exploring more character-driven and story-driven shows instead of remaining confined to the comfort of the romance genre.