The Optimized Cookie

A/N: This post is re-published in Feb 2026, but was written in a previous blog site in 2020, during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

I would like to preface this by saying that reports show around 17.7% are now unemployed here in my country. Unfortunately, I currently belong in that statistic. I have been giving out my resumes around positions I feel I can do well on and new waters I would like to dip my foot in. I figured I needed to clean my emails so that when these employers contact me through my email, I could easily spot the new message and not have it drowned in other emails advertising discounted plane tickets or on who replied on my YouTube comments.

In my journey of clearing my emails, I have struck gold in the very depths of my Socials tab sifting through notifications from my book blog when I was in college. And oh, what a wonderful journey that was.

Being a bookworm was one of the best things I have ever been and books have gotten me through rough patches of my teenage to young adult life. Books were my sanctuary. So much so that I barely came out of my room when I started reading book after book after book and I loved every second of it.

I even remember I was so into books that I forgot how to socialize and how actual, in person conversations worked.

That led me to try creating a book blog account on Tumblr back in 2014ish. After a while, I got a handful of followers and saw posts that inspired me to dive deeper into book blogging and really sit down and write about what I had to say after reading. And so I did with WordPress. That blog is still up now but sadly it hasn’t been touched since 2016 because I never had the time to spare after getting a job in another city.

I had little time in college to read books because I was juggling my own business and being a working student, but I allotted every single bit of my free time to reading books and blogging. Looking back, I feel very happy I did it and I feel proud of what I got to publish.

I did some projects and book tours with other book bloggers, like the “Fanboy Book Club” and the “Backlist Revival Project” that supported local authors, and also did some mini book segments by myself like “D.E.A.R. :*insert book title*” which meant ‘Drop Everything And Read. It took me hours to draft a post but not a single second felt tolling. It never felt like a job. And as cliche as it sounds, it made me feel alive and purposeful.

Now that I think about it, a year into my work I felt like I was losing a huge part of myself and my book blog days were fading more and more into just a memory.

Hopefully one day, I’ll get to book blogging again, or maybe if I feel brave enough to show my face I can start a BookTube channel. Who knows? But at least my unemployment gives me time to go back to who I was before I got sucked in the corporate world and it makes me excited to potentially get back on to what I loved the most – books.

So if you’re reading this and you have a passion for something, please don’t let it go like I did. It’s hard to balance lots of things happening at once, yes, but don’t lose yourself and your energy over things that don’t make you happy in the process. You deserve it.

Thanks for reading!

What are the things you’re currently passionate about? Are you still doing them now or plan to get back to it soon?

Xo