It’s been two weeks since I was laid off. Now it seems “more real” to me than it was right after that. Yesterday, I visited the career service of my university in Hamilton to have a “drop-in clinic” session. While I was waiting for my session in the waiting area after signing up, I found a ladybug on a table in front of me. Ladybug is tentomushi in Japanese, which literally means “sun bug”. If I understand correctly, ladybug is called “sun bug” in Japan because they are always walking toward the sun. The fact is that they always walk upward to get to a tip of something, like grass or branch, because they are not good at flying out of a flat surface. Flying is more efficient way to get to a different point, and they keep walking upward to move on.
As I mentioned in an old post, I don’t like so-called positive thinking for some reasons. First of all, I don’t like typical positive thinkers’ dualism as seen in their typical argument like “thinking ‘half empty’ is negative and bad, thinking ‘half full’ is positive and good”. Positive thinking may make you feel better in an apparently bad situation, but I prefer to see everything as it is (though it is virtually impossible) and to think what I can do from there realistically whether the glass is half full or half empty. It’s so easy to be depressed when people are unemployed, as I had experienced two years ago and as I am experiencing right now. Some people may tell me “think positively. This can be a good opportunity for a better job”, which may be true, actually. But I still prefer seeing the current situation as it is whether it is positive or negative and think realistically.
Through the counseling yesterday, however, I found that I often think negatively. I often hesitate to write my accomplishments on my resume, believe or not. The logic behind that is that I don’t want to talk about bad things about other people on my resume; what I did was to make a bad situation “normal”, and in order to tell it I have to describe how bad other people had been. What I found yesterday is that I only need to tell how much I improved something, whether I saw it as from bad to normal or from normal to better. This must be nothing special for many other people, but for me it is a different way of thinking. My viewpoint at work had been negative while I could have seen everything as it was. Now, let’s recall what I have done so far from a different viewpoint, and think how I can describe it as my accomplishments. Recently I found that this is a good opportunity for me to re-think of myself and what I have done from a different perspective, or from the perspective that I used to have but forgot because of the depressing job. I may look like a ladybug for some people. I am only looking for a practical place to take off, but it may look like a positive thinker walking toward the sun. Whether it is realistic or positive, I need to keep walking anyways.
By the way, about a century ago, a famous feminist in Japan stated “元始、女性は太陽であった (originally, women were the sun)”. According to her, it makes sense to call ladybug “sun bug”, doesn’t it?