— Notes from My Own Floating
“Ground Control to Major Tom..”, there’s a song by David Bowie about an astronaut named Major Tom. He’s strapped into his capsule, the countdown finishes, and he leaves the ground behind. And then, somewhere past the point of no return, something in him just… lets go. He stops trying to get back. He floats. Calm. Detached. Watching the planet he came from turn slowly, beautifully, and completely out of reach.
I think about that image more than I probably should, these days.
Jobless, and Running Out of Savings
It’s been 17 months with no job. No income. My savings are getting thinner every week, and I can feel the bottom of that tank the way you can feel the bottom of a glass before you’ve even finished drinking. I’ve sent out application after application. Cover letters, portfolios, follow-ups. And mostly what comes back is nothing. Not a rejection, even — just silence. The kind of silence that makes you start to wonder if you’re still transmitting at all, or if the signal just stopped reaching anyone a while ago.
That’s the floating part. Untethered from a routine, from a title, from the ordinary proof that you’re doing something with your one life. No ground control. No clear direction home.
My mom tells me to pray more. To tell God plainly what I want, and to trust. And I do believe that. I still have my faith, I still have Jesus with me in this — that part hasn’t left, even out here. But there’s this other voice in me, quieter but just as stubborn, that keeps saying: berserah itu bukan berhenti berusaha. Surrender isn’t supposed to mean giving up the trying. So I sit in that tension almost every day now — wanting to let go and rest in that faith, and also knowing I still have to paddle, still have to search, still have to send one more application into what feels like an empty room.
Some mornings the effort itself feels pointless. Like Major Tom pressing buttons in a capsule that isn’t going anywhere anyway. I’ve been trying to build something out of the only real material I have left, which is that I’ve always been a writer, a dreamer with a brain full of stories and no direction to point them. So I’m trying now — content writing, this blog, whatever comes. And the road is dark. Genuinely dark. I won’t pretend I can see the end of it from here.
Grateful and Afraid, at the Same Time
And yet — and this is the part that confuses me most — I wake up every single day still grateful. Grateful I’m alive. Grateful there’s a roof over my head. Grateful I can fill my stomach. That gratitude is real, it’s not performed, it sits right next to the fear without cancelling it out. I don’t know how to explain that to people who expect gratitude to mean things are fine, or expect fear to mean things are falling apart. Both are just… true, at the same time, in the same body.
I don’t have an ending for this one. I’m not going to tell you I found the checklist that gets me back to solid ground, because I haven’t. I’m still floating. Still sending signals out into a silence that mostly doesn’t answer. Still torn between “let go and trust” and “keep trying,” most days landing somewhere in the middle, exhausted by both.
Maybe that’s just what this stage is. Not a problem to be solved by the end of a blog post, but a season to be named honestly, while it’s still happening. Ground Control, this is Major Tom. Still out here. Still watching the blue planet turn. Not sure yet which way is home — but still, somehow, breathing. (stf)
