Shen Yu, a seasoned white-collar professional with ten years of experience, lost a contest she had "carefully planned" herself and was "let go." She then found herself in an "unexpected" nine-month GAP period.
When she was working, Shen Yu had eyes only for her job. She thought that if she did her work well and kept improving herself, she could wait until she made middle management, settle in, and think about everything else later.
But the GAP came unexpectedly, and Shen Yu realized she might have been too absorbed in promotions and pay raises. She had forgotten that time was catching up with her, as was the social timetable she was expected to follow. The feelings buried beneath her busy workload had never gone away. They had been catching up with her all along.
Once she finally had time on her hands, all the emotions suppressed by her busy work and all the major questions in life she had pushed aside came flooding back into Shen Yu's mind. Only then did she realize how absent-mindedly she had lived all these years. She hadn't deliberately avoided anything, but it seemed she had never taken anything seriously, either.
And loneliness, it seemed, had always been there, following her like a shadow all these years... Instinctively trying to escape that emptiness, she inevitably stumbled into someone else's "beautiful secret garden"...
The sky is gray, the clouds pile high. Where can the birds in the wind fly?
Year after year, my heart trembles. Do those who chase their dreams ever regret?
As her GAP period stretched on, Shen Yu's changing moods and unexpected experiences gave her a chance to reconsider the choices she had made. She also unexpectedly fell into an intense "emotional storm" that was "something like love." After examining the waves within her heart time and again, she finally received an offer from a company she had long wanted to join. Though her feelings were complicated, she decided that since "every meeting happens only once, and all who meet must part," it was better to cherish the beauty of the first memories and give this "mistake in the flower field," made possible because she had taken the initiative, an ending she could look back on fondly.
Updated daily at 18:00
The story's message: Growth comes in stages, and perseverance takes resolve. No choice is right or wrong; not regretting it is enough.
