What I Did After the Exam, Before the Results

I kept wondering what kind of post should become the first article on my personal website.

Should it be a food diary about all the dinners I had after the exam? Reflections on starting to stream? Thoughts on the many games I played? None felt quite right. I am, after all, a workaholic through and through, so I decided to write about everything I did from the end of last December to the end of this February—and how my life and work changed along the way.

The whole of 2021 was exhausting. It felt as if I were constantly racing against time.

I had been dividing my time roughly 40% toward the national examination and 60% toward work and everything else. I did not want to abandon any of my personal learning plans, and if all I did was study for the exam, I would have lost my mind. There was also one other reason: greed. I wanted to do everything.

That balance collapsed when the pandemic suddenly worsened, Taiwan entered Level 3 restrictions, and classes moved online. From around May onward, official rules required remote teaching. Because of the standards I set for myself, I used both slides and recorded lessons, and nearly every hour of every week disappeared into online teaching.

My schedule became 100% cram-school work. From the moment I woke up until I went to sleep, I was making slides, recording lessons, handling school administration, and answering students’ questions. Forget my other learning plans—I did not touch the national-exam material again after May.

Just as I was preparing to give up on that year’s exam, the first stage of the bar examination was postponed twice. By September, I was finally free from online lessons and back to in-person teaching. With only a little more than a month left, I barely made it past the first stage. Then I spent two short months rebuilding from the basics and practicing second-stage problems. My schedule became 60% examination preparation and 40% work, with no entertainment and no real rest.

My mental state was terrible. I did not dare meet anyone and felt as though I could collapse at any moment. Fortunately, I still had to teach one day each week. Sometimes it felt as if my students were the ones saving me.

I forced myself to hold together until the examination ended. As I rode away from the two-day test site beside Taipei Children’s Amusement Park, everything felt strangely unreal.

I swear that if I prepare for the national examination again, I will lower the percentage of my life that I give to it.

What kept me going through the second stage under that kind of time pressure was a Google Keep list of everything I wanted to do after the exam. I kept telling myself: once this is over, I can finally do the things I love. Just hold on a little longer!

Did I continue studying between the exam and the results? Of course not. I was already wondering whether I wanted to take the exam again at all—what are you even asking?

Trying a New Salon and Dyeing My Hair a Color I Loved

I had never cared much about hairstyles. I mostly kept my hair long, straight, and black, with a straightening treatment about once every six months.

Then I saw a former student who changed her hair color often. She is beautiful, so honestly every color looks good on her. I suddenly thought: after the exam, I want a completely new color too—a marker for the beginning of a newer life.

This may sound a little melodramatic, but I had always admired red hair because so many anime characters I love have red hair. Dyeing mine red felt a bit like paying tribute to them.

The salon I used to visit always had a slightly parental vibe XD—the kind of place that might lecture you about how dye damages your hair. So I decisively switched salons. A friend’s friend happened to share a small promotional post, and I decided to give the place a try.

I absolutely love the new color! I forgot to warn the stylist beforehand, though, and he showed up in a white shirt. The dyeing process looked like a crime scene =口=. Next time I will definitely remember to warn him XDDD.

Sleeping as Much as I Needed

When did I stop waking up and thinking, “Wow, I slept enough”? Probably sometime in high school.

I barely studied during my first two years of high school. After listening to a mentor, I forced myself to cut sleep so I could catch up—sometimes down to only one hour a day. Even after entering university, staying up late was a habit, and I rarely slept more than four hours. Having trained myself through a period of deliberately reduced sleep, I could still work and learn. But in my third year, seven weekly cram-school shifts, private tutoring, and laboratory work finally became too much. After one emotional breakdown, I stopped being able to sense where my stress and exhaustion came from. I could keep performing under pressure, which looked useful, but it seems to have left consequences.

I often felt as if my soul were not inside my body—as if I occupied a place while another version of me stood nearby and watched. Right. I had lost my sense of reality.

During the online-teaching period, I once stared at my slides and suddenly lost consciousness. When I woke up, three hours had passed. I started crying without knowing why: “Was I under that much stress? How could I not feel it?”

That loss of reality troubled me for years, and I had no idea where to begin fixing it.

So I decided to start by getting enough sleep.

Now, whenever I feel tired, I sleep until I am satisfied. Some mornings I wake at six and start working; other days I sleep until noon. If I want to go to bed early, I do. If today’s work is unfinished, tomorrow exists. If lunch or dinner makes me sleepy, I take a nap.

My sense of reality has slowly returned, which is wonderful. I do not know when I will finally feel fully rested, but for now I want to treat myself more kindly about this.

Finishing a Complete Set of Curriculum-Aligned Physics Textbooks

A few years earlier, just when I thought my teaching materials were finally settled and I could focus on the national exam—ta-da—the 2019 curriculum officially arrived. New teaching methods, new schedules, and reordered chapters meant rebuilding my materials all over again. Yay.

Before focusing on the second-stage exam, I had left the final volume, Current, Circuits, and Modern Physics, unfinished. The moment the exam ended, I spent a week revising it, adding new past-exam questions, and sending it to print. After three years, I finally became a teacher with a complete self-written set of senior-high physics materials for the new curriculum!

Students kept complaining that the covers could not feature cute girls—or something a little more provocative. Excuse me, I still have an image to maintain, okay? XD And if the cover looked like that, would you really take it out at school to do your homework?

Restarting My Personal Learning and Online-Course Plans

Once online teaching began in May, every personal learning plan stopped. I escaped online classes after the first-stage exam only to throw myself straight into national-exam preparation, so my own studies remained frozen for more than half a year.

After the second stage, I cheerfully neglected the national exam. I finished the Hahow web-development course I had been taking forever, returned to my video-editing books, and started reading novels before bed again. (My previous bedtime reading was civil procedure and pleadings, which was honestly unhinged = =.) I also returned to books on copywriting and presentation design. At last, I started to feel alive in the world again.

A friend once asked over dinner, “Do you actually finish the online courses you buy?” Yes. Every course I have purchased gets watched from beginning to end, with notes XDDDD. It is one of my tiny personal rules.

Becoming a Streamer and Paying Off My Enormous Gaming Debt

My students always complained that I bought games and never played them—the classic person who is all talk. The truth was that I had no time. I had reached the point where I could not find a single spare hour for games, which sounds deeply tragic. My life consisted of work, work, and more work.

“Then make playing games part of your job. You’ll finally play them, right?” a friend told me one day.

If gaming became work, that could only mean becoming a streamer. I spent a week applying what I had learned about OBS from online teaching, bought a capture card, and began a very casual journey of paying off my gaming debt. My position was simple: become a streamer who actually finishes games and presents their stories faithfully.

Recently I have had no chance to stream at all. The results were coming on March 1, and my personal website was still somewhere behind a cloud, so I locked myself away for two weeks and produced pages at full speed =口=. The stream gathered an impressive layer of dust Orz. Once the website settles down, the streaming journey will restart! #Believe

Finishing My Personal Website—Yes, This One XD

Because I was planning to start a business someday, I had long wanted a personal website. Facebook and Instagram are important social platforms, of course, but when I write, I still want a small space of my own that can bring readers inward.

WordPress would have been perfectly usable. But after learning basic front-end development, UI details, color design, and a little back-end knowledge, I wanted a site entirely in my own style. I also wanted to put more than a year of learning into practice—and I genuinely love building web pages. A minute with a law book can make me sleepy XDDDD, but I can spend two days coding without sleeping or eating and still feel wide awake. So I ruled out templates and built the whole site from scratch.

I began with colors from Color Hunt, designed the Wakame logo, and drew every small illustration in Illustrator to keep the style consistent. Bootstrap provided the base, but I adjusted most details by hand. After writing a page, I always opened it on my phone to check the responsive design, then slowly filled in the content.

It felt incredibly satisfying. This is still the website style that feels most comfortable to me, and I hope to keep making it as friendly to readers as possible.

Starting to Learn WordPress

If I could already build a personal website, why learn WordPress?

I had studied for a year and touched some JavaScript, but that was nowhere near enough for a production website. At most, I could build a simple interactive site or one that presented information. If I needed a shopping cart or membership system, I had no idea how to do it. The business plans I was discussing with friends, however, were very likely to need those advanced features.

WordPress offers many excellent plugins, a simple interface, and a practical back end. There are also countless tutorials, so useful information is easy to find. Rather than manually studying how front- and back-end systems exchange data—and worrying about security—we could use reliable tools others had already built. My friends and I could then focus on the business itself instead of wrestling with website technology.

Sometimes standing on the shoulders of giants really does let you see more.

Catching Up on Everything I Needed to Know About Building a PC

Once I became a streamer, the limits of my computer became painfully obvious.

My MSI laptop had a discrete GPU, but it was only a GTX 1050 and could not handle OBS’s GPU encoding while streaming. More demanding games lagged terribly, and I could not stream at 60 FPS, so I had to settle for 30 FPS.

I had wanted to build a new computer for a long time, but graphics cards were almost impossible to buy at list price. I also knew so little about building PCs that walking into Guanghua Digital Plaza felt like volunteering to become an enormous sheep waiting to be shorn. So I studied intensively: architecture first, then what each part does and how to choose it. I showed my parts list to people I knew and was lucky enough to receive explanations of every component and the factors behind each purchasing decision.

I can read computer specifications comfortably now. Asking for a quotation at Coolpc also went smoothly XD. I hope I can buy some of the parts and practice assembling them myself, although friends and students keep warning me not to destroy every component =口=.

Resolving a Legal Dispute—and Making Peace with a Story from Thirty Years Ago

A few days after the second-stage exam, I received a formal legal notice about something that had happened to the previous generation thirty years earlier. Resolving it required a great deal of the civil-law knowledge I had learned. I could not help wondering: did I study law for all these years just for this moment?

Fortunately, it was ultimately resolved smoothly, and everything developed in a positive direction.

Rewriting My Résumé and Unexpectedly Applying for an Excellent Job

A Hahow instructor I admired posted a part-time personal-assistant role. The benefits were very attractive, and the requested skills fit me surprisingly well. I had planned to apply for ISO consulting work if the March 1 results were negative, but I used the opportunity to rewrite my résumé and made it through every round during Lunar New Year, all the way to the final interview.

Unfortunately, they actually wanted a full-time assistant, and my schedule could not fully accommodate that. I eventually received the silent-rejection card XD. Still, the interview was valuable. I seriously placed myself on the market, gained a clearer sense of my current value, and roughly understood what leverage I might have in future negotiations. If possible, after the March 1 result was settled, I wanted to ask whether another arrangement might exist.

Meeting People for Meals and Beginning to Plan My Career and Network

I used to believe that until I had achieved something, I should not eat with friends because I could not promise anyone anything about the future.

Then one day I passed a MOS Burger near my home and saw a sentence on the chalkboard outside: “Your friends mostly care whether they can share a meal with you. They do not care very much whether you have already succeeded.”

The results were not out yet, and realistically I had probably just accompanied everyone else to the exam. But I had finished most of the reading and mainly needed more problem practice. It was time to begin the many small plans waiting afterward.

I met with friends I hoped to start a business with and discussed what we might do next. I also spent a long time talking with my mentor about future plans and what paths might be available after I left my current cram school in two years.

I caught up with many other friends too. They held the anxiety I felt before the results, and I fully realized that failing would not end anything. The world would still be here.

Living with the Anxiety of Waiting for the Results

Many friends asked whether I thought I would pass this time.

Honestly? No. That year was unusually difficult: I studied for the first stage for only a little over a month and prepared for the second for only two months in total. I still had piles of unread books. I had not opened some subject-specific problem books or practiced past papers before taking the exam. I could recognize what each question was testing, but I had read only so much. All I could do was place everything I knew on the page for the graders. There was nothing else.

But I thoroughly enjoyed the happiness and fullness of not studying for the national exam. Even when I stayed awake building web pages and drawing in Illustrator, I felt incredibly happy. I did not want to return to the life I had been living, so part of me hoped I might pass.

Of course, that hope was unrealistic. Someone who had not finished even 20% of the planned reading list had no business discussing passing. Still, that year’s questions felt unusually friendly to me. I could identify most of the issues; I simply wrote the answers poorly. What if the next second-stage exam did not give me questions that suited me so well?

Then I thought about the principle I had always followed: do not prepare only for an exam; believe that “when your ability reaches the required level, you will pass.” If I believed that, I should not gamble on the tiny chance of getting lucky. With several more months of preparation, I would be more likely to know the questions and less anxious while waiting for the results. Failing this time would be fine—or perhaps this opportunity simply should not belong to me yet.

To borrow a phrase my students often use: “Whatever.” That made it easier to live with the feeling before the results. If there was no chance, there was no reason to expect anything. After March 1, I would return to my desk on schedule. For now, finishing the things I wanted to do mattered most.

Compared with other bar-exam candidates, I had always thought I was unbelievably unserious. Many people began studying for the next examination immediately after the previous results, while I ran off to do all kinds of things and neglected the exam completely. But after looking back through this post—wait, I actually did quite a lot!

That made me feel much better XDDDDDDD. Not studying is amazing. Absolutely excellent!