HUMANITY
The Proust Questionnaire: 2020 Edition
The classic reflection questionnaire
I have been tagged by Agnes Laurens to try out the Proust Questionnaire! It’s been a few days since she’s tagged me so perhaps the first thing you should learn about me is that I’m a procrastinator. Here we go!
I’d actually first heard of the Proust Questionnaire in high school. I filled one out in ninth grade, and then again in tenth grade… but I can’t locate these files anymore. It would have been so interesting to dig them up for comparison, considering the high school is now almost a decade in the past for me.
What I learned to do is to look forward. Here is me completing the Proust Questionnaire on the interwebs, which hopefully means it will be eternally immortalized in the bones of Medium.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Enough. That’s the first word that popped into my head. This is something entirely new to myself because I spent my teen years and early twenties chasing after something.
I’d be happy after I score high enough on the GREs. But when I did well on the GREs, I told myself I’d be happy after I got into grad school. But then after I got into grad school, I told myself I’d be happy once I graduated high school.
Most people can’t relate to this exact rendition of the hedonic treadmill, but I’m sure that everyone has their own metric of some “happier” milestone. Where reaching this mythical milestone will automatically trigger True Joy — for real, for the final time.
In this context, I think I was too afraid to say that I was perfectly happy now. I’ll just come out and say it.
I am perfectly happy now.
It comes with a certain level of privilege to be able to say this, especially during such political complications and a pandemic. At the same time, I’m not working with a lot here, on a below-minimum-wage graduate stipend working more-than-full-time — some of that time dealing with quite nasty student emails.
For me, the biggest barrier was giving myself “permission” to be happy, to accept that what I have is enough, because it genuinely is enough.
What is your greatest fear?
I am a human of many fears and anxieties, so it’s wild to reflect that I don’t actually have a greatest fear. Sure, my threshold for my threat system to start wailing its siren is relatively low, considering that your local fluffy dog is just enough to trigger that reaction. I’d rate my fear of dogs at a 5/10.
At the same time, I don’t significantly fear other “larger” things at a much higher rate. I don’t particularly fear death much more (6/10), nor have the same anxieties about not making enough money or never graduating grad school (7/10), nor the fear of a close relationship ending (4/10).
My greatest fear — then — is probably my mom. A fierce, abusive woman that left a few therapists speechless on giving advice on how to reasonably set boundaries with her. One therapist who’d been working for 20 years in toxic relationships looked me in the eyes and said, “she’s the most boundary overstepping woman heard of in my career”. I’d rate my fear of my mom at an 8.5/10.
Yet, I conquered that fear. Sure, it’s a fear with a high rating, but it’s a number that represents the past. I set boundaries despite these evaluations and despite how much she overstepped them. So is it still fear? Sure. But it’s more of an archived fear, I suppose, like an archived email — a memory of the past pulled up intermittently, hopefully never.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
My automatic response is still “I’m lazy”. My less knee-jerk response is that others might label me that way because they only glimpse a subset of what I do, and believe that that’s all I do.
So, the more accurate trait I dislike (maybe not deplore) is that these expectations still bother me and shift my commitments and behaviours towards what other people want other than I really want in life.
Which living person do you most admire?
This is a tough one, but most recently I think it’s Michelle Obama. Her book Becoming has resonated with me deeply, made me feel less alone, and empowered me to rest and set boundaries so I can tackle the things that are truly meaningful to me.
What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Productivity. This is coming from someone who does write about productivity. I feel like there’s this aimless goal of producing more, and more, and more that’s become embedded in the culture.
I try to focus on writing about productivity in being efficient in doing the things you feel are truly meaningful to you, or the things you have to do in order to take the time to do the things you want. Even as I write this sentence, I’m conflicted, raising two questions:
- Why do we “have” to do those things? What is the meaning behind that task?
- A lot of people have to do certain things just in order to survive and it’s not a personal choice on whether they can do things any other way; we have to address things at the systemic level too.
On what occasion do you lie?
I lie most when I’m uncomfortable. I care quite a lot about how others feel that it’s become sometimes a habit that I’ll lie about whether something is making me uncomfortable, or what I did, just to conform to a “norm” that does not welcome me.
This is how I lie:
To fit in is the origami of folding yourself up, all tiny, to slide into the ever-closing space accidentally left open for you.
Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
“Like” & “Um”.
What or who is the greatest love of your life?
- eggs
- hourglasses
- mindful moments
- routines and habits
- challenging myself to be outside of my comfort zone
- books
When and where were you happiest?
In the here and now, when I am neither mentally time travelling to the future (worrying about the 919726329387 things that can go wrong soon), or ruminating about the past (the 192378120398123 things I would like to redo in 128917623918273 ways).
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
A relatively new thing that’s working for me is to tackle small habits, Matt D’Avella style for short periods of time. I’m building a repertoire of new habits, and like Charles Duhigg outlines in his book The Power of Habit, small habits are the foot-in-the-door to developing longer-term habits.
I’m already doing this, but the thing I could “change” is to make this habit of reflection, change, and growth a consistent thing rather than just a “new” thing I’m trying.
During the pandemic, the habit I started was writing for Medium. The ensuing habits that happened that seem absolutely unrelated include:
- Trying therapy out again via BetterHelp after some pretty negative experiences on Talkspace.
- Developed a steady meal prep routine, which naturally gave me a setlist of ingredients that contributed to a grocery list, which then meant I had a set budget for food so I can consistently buy in bulk.
- Which meant I more consistently checked in on my budget.
- I started reading for leisure after about a decade of giving up this habit. I also then organized a better reading routine for grad school, which previously consisted of “randomly downloading random pdfs with naming conventions such as paper.pdf, paper (1).pdf and lakjsdhalskdj.pdf” to using a citation manager that helps me manage references and has cut down my manuscript writing time in half.
- I started a daily writing habit for different facets in my life: morning pages (for self-reflection/ journalling), Medium (daily poetry but also article writing), inching forward my PhD thesis daily with dedicated time so it doesn’t feel overwhelming.
They all seem so unrelated to Medium writing, right? But the foot-in-the-door is that for someone to write about anything interesting, they have to live their life. And here I was, experimenting with weird things but also things that helped me grow.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
I cut ties with an abusive mother.
Where would you most like to live?
In a big city in a two-bedroom condo with lots of sunlight surrounded by lots of books. This is such a pipe dream but I’m working on it! Mandatory: a garbage chute because I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate designated garbage days.
What do you most value in your friends?
Honestly. Authenticity. Weirdness. Support. Reciprocality. Humour. Imperfection. Resilience.
Which historical figure do you most identify with?
To every woman, especially to every BIPOC woman in science who has laid the groundwork, fought for their foot to be in this door, for us to join, for us to have a space and advocate for the policies that support us.
To the woman in the bathroom line at my first scientific conference who celebrated that there was a line to the women’s bathroom and that this line keeps growing — that more and more women are getting involved in this field.
Who are the heroes in real life?
Currently, it’s AOC — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In a messy time where I thought there was no hope, I saw her, voicing up on issues and resiliently pushing on.
What is your motto?
You can probably fix this using what you already have.
Thank you to Tree Langdon, CPA, CGA for initiating this idea & thank you again to Agnes Laurens for tagging me!
I dare Pierre Trudel, Clare Almand, Connie Song, Anthi Psomiadou, Ruchi Thalwal, Rochelle Silva, Aimée Gramblin, Melissa Bee to join me in this questionnaire!
Planning to revisit this in 2021, fingers crossed I remember!
Lucy (The Eggcademic) [she/her] had so much fun writing this and definitely went over any ignored word limits for certain questions. What’s next: Something random or this amazing piece from Bingz Huang?
