Add new article about a love letter to myself

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+---
+articleTitle: A Love Letter to Myself
+date: 2025-02-10T20:31:26+0800
+desc: I decided to take the opportunity of 32-Bit Cafe's 2025 Valentine's Day code jam to write a love letter to myself.
+categories: ["personal life"]
+---
+
+[32-Bit Cafe](https://32bit.cafe/) is hosting a code jam for Valentine's Day 2025, titled ["Party for One"](https://32bit.cafe/vday25/), as the theme is making a digital Valentine's Day gift dedicated to yourself. After much consideration, I decided to take this opportunity to write a love letter to myself, as a Valentine's Day gift to myself and a reminder of my self-worth.
+
+---
+
+Dear Leilukin,
+
+You and I go way back to the beginning of your life, and we have stuck with each other through thick and thin. There is so much I want to tell you, and I hope by writing this letter, you will appreciate how much I cherish, admire and respect you.
+
+You have come a long way since your childhood and adolescence. You have grown from an insecure child with low self-esteem after enduring years of bullying at school, desperate for external validation and other people's approval, to an adult who takes pride in who they are and does not care about what others think of them. Therefore, it is unsurprising that you said that while adulthood certainly has its challenges, you do not miss being a child or teenager, and you actually enjoy being an adult.
+
+I know very well that your self-confidence did not come easy, and it did not happen overnight either. After being traumatised by years-long abuse from a secondary school bully and later a personal betrayal from someone who sided with said bully, whom you thought was your friend, you went on to struggled with trust issues and lack of faith in yourself throughout your early adulthood, even though you never met those people who hurt you the most again, until you attended therapy when you were approaching your late 20s. With your therapist's help, you learned that life is like a train, with the people you have met in your life as your passengers, and after the people who hurt you and vandalised your train left, you can choose to redecorate your train and welcome new people in your life who would treat you better. Learning this metaphor was what finally made you learn that it is not worth letting the people who hurt you to continue to define your life.
+
+I am proud of you for figuring out you are a queer, autistic, non-binary lesbian on the asexual and aromantic spectrum as an adult, despite the lack of queer and autistic resources and media representation when you grew up. It is fortunate that you encountered online queer and autistic communities and resources that helped you figure yourself out, but at the end of the day, it was you who decided to take active steps in understanding yourself better, so you know how to live your life better, and to not be afraid to be different. When you were a kid, fellow students in school had bullied you for being a socially awkward and friendless "weird" kid, but normality is a social construct, so your worth as a person is not determined by how "normal" you are perceived by others. You are unique, and your uniqueness is worth celebrating. You do not need to rely on someone else for your happiness, either.
+
+The self-worth you spent years in building up has also given you the strength to accept your [retinitis pigmentosa diagnosis](living-with-retinitis-pigmentosa.md), as you understand that the possibility of losing sight is not the end of the world. Queer and disability pride in the face of a cisheternormative and ableist society is an act of rebellion. Being a non-binary lesbian who refuses to conform to traditional gender roles is also a defiance to a patriarchy.
+
+Learning to look after your well-being and to set boundaries are crucial for a happy and fulfilling life, so I applaud you for making decisions out of consideration for your well-being, including:
+
+- Going to therapy to improve your mental health;
+- Leaving an openly anti-gay church to join a queer-affirming one;
+- Switching your career path to web development, a field you actually feel confident and interested in doing, after being burned out from graphic design as a profession;
+- Seeing an eye doctor to get diagnosed with your eye problems;
+- [Quitting your first web developer job](/blog/posts/2024-12-16-leaving-my-first-developer-job) when it is clear that your web developer skills were not valued by your employers enough, and the job will likely make you more miserable in the long run if you stayed.
+
+Furthermore, I admire your spirit of treating learning as a lifelong process, and understanding the importance of thinking for yourself, by keeping yourself curious and not being afraid of learning new things, while remaining true to yourself, by standing firm with your convictions to be kind and striving to be authentic.
+
+Together we will live the best life we can possibly have. No matter what happens, I will always love you.
+
+Love,<br>
+Me

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+---
+date: 2025-02-10T20:31:30+0800
+---
+
+* New article: ["A Love Letter to Myself"](/articles/love-letter-to-myself).