Friends,

A little over a year ago, I was crashing out.

Ya girl wasn’t doing so hot. Not only was I just really sick. I was attempting to numb myself out of sadness with prescribed medication, alcohol, sleep, and of course, good old recreational drugs.

What happened? Well, for one I can now recognize that I was not operating on optimum energy levels for the better part of 2024. I spent most of last year asleep in on one of my two (very cozy) 6ft beanbag. Ugh, literally some of the best purchases I’ve made with my grown up money. Physically, I was constantly looked bloated, tired and I felt heavy. Mentally, I had just gotten the reality check that confirmed to me that a version of events I had been holding onto with hope for about half a decade was probably never going to happen.

If you are impatient like me, here is the TLDR version: I was stuck in a situation that I can best describe as “limerence.”

In my case, the love interest isn’t really even a real person but more like an abstract dream. A dream that I bought into with my own volition because it promised sweet nothings. I was sold this faulty dream that life would go a certain way for me only if I stuck to the plan that I was told to do, kept being a “good girl” and did what I was told. Well.. that dream came to an end when I realized that I loved the dream, but it didn’t love me back. Well, not all parts of me.

You could say that the dawning that I was dealing with a situation of unrequited love was the singular catalyst for my crash out but, no. You’d be incorrect. I had been mentally collecting, aligning and catalouging all the pieces of my crash out together for years. The understanding that I was more invested into about a person an idea than it was about me was the first kicked-over domino in the impressive structure that I had been mentally constructing for years.

To fully deconstruct the catalyst for my emotional and mental crash out, I should start somewhere around December 2020 or January 2021. Hmm, I’ll pick the latter. January 2021 it puts me directly at the start of trying to figure out how I would actually survive the slum that is adulthood.

To set the mood picture this: A cold and dark winter.  The world is still shut down, coronavirus is rampaging our society, social unrest is still at an all-time high, and we are just days away from the change of power. 

As for me, well I am this 22 year old broke foreign recent college graduate, stuck in flight or fight mode, living in North Philadelphia off of my paltry savings from an internship in 2019, trying to figure out what I am actually going to do with my life.

We will start here and then I will take you through the joys, miseries, and complexity that has been young adulthood for me. I am here to share my story with the hope that you will experience one or two good laughs, at my expense of course. 

Lastly, I think we will end our tour on the evening of 31st of December 2024, when I spent my last day of the year in my shared apartment, emotionally numb, staring at a wall, knowing that something needed to change.

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In the Beginning

It is January 2021.

I have just purchased the domain for “Tobi’s Room” thinking that I am going to start a blog about the challenges of being an international student in the U.S. At the time, I was interviewing friends about their experiences and trying to find an angle on how I would even begin to talk about the disproportionate amount of opportunities I felt barred from while living in a society where I literally paid thousands of dollars to come to, in hopes of achieving educational and financial opportunities that were not available where I am from.

To be very honest, if I had followed through and wrote what was on my mind, I would have certainly been a maverick of my time. As I write this in 2025, boy, has it only gotten worse to be anything other than a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant in that country. The good thing is now more people are seeing it for what it has literally always been.

Unfortunately, back in 2021, low self-confidence, empty bank accounts, and undiagnosed mental health conditions did not let me be great, so I put it on the back burner in favor of… well… survival.

So, boom, here I am, a fellow peasant trying to decorate the metaphorical walls of my newly inhabited home in the slums of adulthood. I was attempting to motivate myself by doing Chloe Ting workouts, running with Couch to 5K, deleting social media apps, and isolating myself physically (Corona) and mentally (undiagnosed depression). I was also on that LeetCode grind because your girl only had until May 6, 2021, to secure a full-time job related to my major or be sent packing home, where she would have likely been deemed a failure by certain stakeholders in her life, silently and unceremoniously.

I had been hoeing myself out on the always-dusty job market streets for months at that point. You name it, I was doing it. Was I sending thirsty AF DMs to random recruiters and people on LinkedIn, trying to trap them into a conversation and then a referall. Yes. Was on every job board telling anybody who would look my way that I would work for hire. Yes. Was I cold-emailing people at companies that I wanted to work at, basically saying: “Hey, I know that I may appear a little raggedy and desperate at the moment, but trust me, I can do good work. I promise you I actually have good training; just look at the resume I’ve updated for the umpteenth time that shows my university degree, internships, and leadership positions. Yes, I am an international student, but just take a chance on me.” Of course.

I was doing all that I knew how to do to get the attention of at least a tech overlord’s knightmen. But it couldn’t be just any knightmen; because of my situation as an international student, I specifically needed to be claimed by an overlord who willingly filed for H-1B and eventually green cards for international workers. The goal was that they would take pity on a lowly servant and bestow upon me an entry-level appointment to uphold me, my family, and my non-existent treasuries.

I will spare you the months of rejections and fall-throughs. Just know that it was emotionally taxing work, and I had very minimal support. Despite having experience at large, known companies, most companies across the board were not trying to stick their necks out for a dirty foreigner. So I just kept chugging out those applications every single day and praying. I was also learning how to regulate my anxiety-ridden self through meditation and exercise because I was also in the middle of a different type of heartbreak, you know, related to an actual man who didn’t treat me right. Yeah, I don’t like to talk about that one.

It took some time, but it eventually happened. After months of running around in a circle, I came across my knight in shining armor, Suzie P. I came across her only a month before my F-1 OPT deadline was set to run out. To a young woman who was on the verge of drowning, Suzie was the first hope of rescue in a long while.

Let me tell you, the one thing I love is a competent person. Suzie, as a recruiter, was fucking amazing. She was responsive, supportive, and dare I say, kind? The woman sent me a good luck email before every single one of my interviews. Where do they do that at? At that point in my job search, she was basically doing the equivalent of reciting me sonnets and comparing me to a summer’s day cause baby, I was smitten.

And who was her overlord, you might ask? Only the owner of two of the websites that I had happily wasted 10+ years of my life on and probably owed a great deal of my degree and knowledge to: Monsieur Google.

Swoons.

Yes. Handsome. Powerful. Rich AF. Google.

Heart-eyes.

Listen, that company wasn’t even on my radar. I had my eyes set on a certain CRM giant that led me on for months. Let me tell you, after three interviews and a panel presentation where I got nothing but high praise, they left me on read for three months then unceremoniously dumped me like a bad habit.

So to be taken notice of by Handsome. Powerful. Rich AF. Google.

Faints.

Well, of course now I have to bring my A game and be a literal freak in the Google Sheets. (Ba dum tss).

I didn’t tell Susie up front about my impending expulsion date from the country. She knew that I was a foreigner because I definitely had to put it down on the application. However, I didn’t want her to look upon me with pity and desperation. All she had to know is that I had the degree and the authorization to work in the U.S., and she confirmed to me the role had the ability to file for international students. That was good enough to stir some hope in me. So with that, she took my resume into those glossy silicone gates, did whatever it is recruiters do, and boom, I was granted an audience with the people of the engineering court.

One thing you should know about me is this: I may have my moments of laziness, but I will put in the work when the time calls for it. For all you Naruto fans, you can basically think of me as the female Shikamaru.

Suzie got me booked and scheduled for my interviews, debriefing me about what to expect every stage of the way. Again, always coming in with those good luck emails right before the interviews, which always made me feel like I was the only candidate in her pipeline the way she paid such attention to me. Also, is it blatantly obvious that I didn’t get much attention as a kid? Anyways, interviews were scheduled over the course of three weeks, which I later heard was, and maybe still literally is, a virtual miracle because for most people the process could take months.

Debby Ryan smirk.

Let this be a lesson, kids: when God is for you, the impossible becomes possible.

I literally have no tact or finesse, so I am not going to hold you in suspense or anticipation before telling you what happened. You best believe your girl pulled out every doggone trick in the book. I put my thing down, flipped it and reversed it during those interviews. I was determined to seduce the engineering court with my technical prowess, and in the end, they loved me! Of course they did. They decided that I was worth their gaze and they were going to turn this lowly foreign hoe into a proper American housewife, complete with a good salary, stock, benefits, healthcare, and annual bonuses. Gasp! Believe it or not, I literally got the job offer from Suzie on the morning my visa was set to expire.

That was it. It was over. I had secured a great position. I would be leaving peasanthood and moving into a castle that capitalism had built. I was doning what I was supposed to do. I had to school. Now I had gotten good job. Honestly, all I needed was the man and I would be “winning” at adulthold. Those five years of strife and all-nighters and knor packet dinners in college were made all worth it with one signature of my name on the dotted line. I was going to be making mula. And Baby-girl, (me) was going to be glorified tech support—oh wait, my official title was to be ‘Technical Solutions Engineer.’ I truly did not even know what that meant at the time, and frankly, I did not care. All I knew was that Baby-girl was moving on up in the world.

Part 2 will be linked here when posted.