A new year has started, and we can all safely agree that January doesn’t count. Since the first month of 2018 was hectic and busy all the way – deadlines, exams, extracurricular activities, chances on the horizon of my personal life – I left my comeback on the blog for the month of February, which brings us here! I hope 2018 has treated you well so far, and you have an outstanding year full of achievements and smiles coming your way.
Beyond ambitious resolutions and an endless to-do list, I decided to walk into 2018 with a positive mindset, which is now a shield against all the bullcrap that life might consider throwing at me. Tell me one year ago that I would become a passionate advocate of positive thinking, and I would laugh in your face – because frankly, I wasn’t a fan of the hippie, happy-go-lucky, sickly sweet and what I thought to be very unrealistic approach that is seemingly shoved down our throats by self-help books and motivational lifestyle blogs. I was pessimistic and, for the most part, a very bitter gal, and I preferred expecting less and keeping my enthusiasm in check to avoid disappointment as much as possible. And although I might have succeeded in doing that, I can’t help but think of the opportunities and the fun times I’ve missed because I was too negative. Or how my mental health has been affected as a result of this personal choice of vision.
I walked into 2018 with lots of fears and worries burdening my shoulders, but also the determination to try new things and make a change about my mindset. The last few months have been eye-opening for me in terms of the things that I can do differently, or not do at all to make myself happier. Take it from me, this is no trick: you can change your life just by changing the way you look at it. If you’re wondering why you haven’t done this before since it sounds so easy, let me tell you, it isn’t. In fact, I found the process to be harder and more painful than just waiting around for things to change by themselves, but infinitely more worth it. If you think this is the sort of thing you need in your life right now, then keep on reading. If not, do it anyway and you might be surprised.
Make choices that are right for yourself.
It sounds like an obvious one, but don’t rush to leave just yet. Sit down and take a good, hard think: when was the last time you said ‘yes’ to an arrangement or proposition that didn’t exactly feel right with you? Made a compromise for a friend, then kicked yourself mentally for doing so and missing out on something you actually wanted? Stepped over your comfort boundaries just because you didn’t want to upset somebody? You might want to say that you do these things only now and then, but the frequency of it is not what’s important. You might insist that this is what a good, selfless person does and that you can’t possibly be selfish towards those you care about. Ugh-huh, think twice.
In life, we are faced with an overwhelming number of choices we have to make on a daily basis, ranging from something as little as deciding what we are going to have for lunch, to giving up our stable 9-to-5 job to pursue our dream of becoming freelancers and owners of small businesses. Regardless of the types of choices we are talking about, we are always the ones to feel the consequences of our choices first: bloating from the Chinese takeaway we had for lunch, or a flourishing small business we control from the comfort of our homes. If we make the choices that our family, friends, partner, boss want us to make, we do so with the certainty that we will not like the consequences that much: they will have a negative impact on us, we will be unhappy with what transpired, we will feel uncomfortable and wish we didn’t have to make the choice in the first place. We lost the game before it even started, and missed on great opportunities, chances and meal ideas we would appreciate in the process.
A practice that I’m actively trying to incorporate in my life is making the right choices for myself, since that would provide me with the greatest possible level of satisfaction and happiness. If given an exciting professional or academic opportunitiy, I take my time thinking whether it fits the plans that I currently have for my future, my present schedule and the amount of energy it leaves me with. I am no longer too shy to say ‘no’ to a social outing or a pastime that I am not in the mood for. I reserve my right to be too tired or too busy for things that other people would rather want me to do. Only when I adopted all these tricks for maintaining the integrity of my choices, have I realised how many different hands were tugging on my sleeves. And it was true relief for me to whack most of them away.
Work hard for what you want.
Sometimes, it feels to me like most of the people I run into and happen to talk to are keen on making it in life with as little work as possible. So many people my age insist that, once they get out of higher education, they will land a job right away, sweeping recruitment interviewers off their feet, or start businesses that will make a million within their first year. Two years ago, I had an ex telling me that a person can be deemed ‘smart’ and ‘successful’ if they make a lot of money without lifting a finger. So many peers of mine are blindly confident about their chances of ‘getting big’ without doing any work, and that made me feel the more shocked, the more I got told by family, teachers and other real adult figures in my life that in fact, you have to work hard to live the life that you want.
In the meanwhile, I did some growing up and learning of my own, and by the time I became the person that I am now, my priorities have realigned. Along with the money I seek to earn with every job I work and the experience I want to add to my résumé, some other things I deem as important have come up: the new things I have learned with each challenge I took up, the skills I have developed and the people I have met and the knowledge they’ve shared with me. Invaluable things, if you ask me, secret cards up my sleeves that help me adapt to any given professional or academic task and respond to its demands. And for those, my friends, you have to work very hard. If you don’t work, you don’t learn and you don’t grow. You think you do, but you don’t. Just like empty calories, they make you feel full, satiated and satisfied, but they don’t provide you with any nutrients of value.
At 20, I know I want to work hard. Every single day of my life, I want to give 100% of my abilities and effort to do something that I love, make it good and share it with the world. Of course I want to live the ‘good life’, everybody does, but I also want to deserve it. Every time I lay down in bed to sleep at night, I want to feel tired enough to know that, on that day, I deserved it. Dare to deserve it, and that will make you happy. I know for a fact it makes me now, and it makes me feel very hopeful about the future, too.
One of the few aesthetic photos I bothered to take in the summer of 2017 - I learned so many tough lessons throughout that holiday, and had a hard time going to bed at night as I struggled to process all those discoveries. (source: personal archive)
The world isn't your enemy, and life isn’t a competition.
Nothing like some good, healthy competition, let it be at school, at work or in your group of friends who practice the same sport. Since I was a little girl, the importance of competition was stressed on everywhere I went, and more often than I am willing to admit, I have lived by it. A saddening number of times, I succumbed to thinking that yes, the most important aspect about getting good grades, working out weekly and writing a blog was making sure that I am the best at it among all the people that I knew, and that things stay that way. I was pit against my peers by teachers, and against conflicting views on what happiness should be by so many people and sources of inspiration that I allowed in my life. I now regret to say that I lived to compete, and felt miserable everytime I failed and somebody else succeeded. From my experience I say, this is a very toxic life to live.
I feel like now more than ever, society pushes young people like me to become sharks and compete to get in the best schools, land the best paid jobs, marry the best partners, live the best lives. And so many of us have complied, forgetting that happiness is different for each and every one of us, and we should try to make the right choices for ourselves. We have complied, despite agreeing to compromises that made us unhappy, chased goals that were not even ours and following the advice of people who didn’t even know us. We danced to awkward stranger tunes and felt bad when we made the wrong step and fell, despite the fact that it was bound to happen since the very start. And now, we shall say, no more!
Now, when setting goals, I seek to make sure that they are mine and nobody else’s. When making an effort towards said goals, I do so while looking straight ahead, and ferociously fighting the urge to peek sideways and check what my neighbours are doing. I take a good, hard focus on myself in every decision and plan I make, but of course, it’s not always easy. More often than not, I get a pang of frustration when I hear that one of my peers is further ahead on an assignment than me, but compared to the past, now I insist on reminding myself that I am doing my best with what I have, and that in itself makes my rhythm and work ethic good. What more do I need?
Let go.
I’ve toyed with the concept of letting go for so long now, and it’s always been hard for me to do anything about it since I never felt like I rightly grasped it. Having gone back to my past, I was convinced I wanted to let go: by either coming to terms with the good and the bad memories, accepting them for what they were, or irremediably erasing them from my brain, altering my identity if that’s what it took. I am a very thoughtful person, and I’ve given my past more energy and emotional investment than I should've, or was really available to at the time. I am now 20, in a safe place and so much more mature than I was then, and yet, past still makes me shiver. If anything, I find that amusing.
A mantra that I adopted for myself that is about letting go is, the trick to holding on is all that letting go. It is a lyric from Taylor Swift that I go back to every time I feel like the past is too much, because it reminds me that past itself is not necessarily unhealthy, but our take on it is, actually, the thing that does us bad. Past is part of who we are, and we wouldn’t be where we are now if it weren’t for the things we did and experiences we chose to be part of then. Past does not define who we are, though, and if we genuinely want to hold on to it, we need to continue to walk forward, let go of it because this is how we honour it: by constantly growing in the body and the soul that have existed then, but exist in a different way now. Letting go isn’t even a choice, it is a responsibility. And letting go is about so much more than our relationship with out past – it is about not holding a grudge against people who don’t know any better than being nasty, it is about accepting the workings of fate as they are, it is about embracing the lack of control that we actually have over our lives. Letting go is about connecting to yourself, right in this moment – and if you ask me, there is nothing that resembles holding on more than this.
Back at university, in my 'safe space' - here, I feel braver than ever to experiment with letting go.
(source: personal archive)
Put yourself first.
I can’t stress it enough: be selfish! Put yourself first and foremost because nobody else will – unless you are goddamn lucky and found an amazing partner or a very caring friend. Don’t be afraid to seek your own interests and take care of your needs before tending to anybody else’s, but beware of becoming an insensitive asshole. As already mentioned under point no. 3, life is not a competition and backstabbing people is, unarguably, a no-no. What I am trying to say is, hold your ground and make a priority out of your comfort and happiness.
My biggest flaw is, by far, that I am a people-pleaser. I constantly feel the need to make sure that people are happy, satisfied and taken care of. I feel immense pleasure from knowing that I am the one to make people smile, and I feel responsible if they show any sign that they might not be having a good time. I feel guilty when I can’t offer people what they want. I can’t say no. The most surprising thing is, I haven’t been aware of any of these things until very recently, and needed outsiders to point it out for me. It got to the point where my partner was begging of me to say no when he asked me to get him a snack, although I have to admit, that was very funny now looking back at it. So as a diagnosed and slowly recovering people-pleaser, I learn how to put myself first more every day. It might not be easy, but it’s definitely liberating.
Some ways I put myself first include: refusing to accept any compromise that could potentially threaten my academic or professional performance, anything that eats in the time I dedicate to my hobbies and to my loved ones, turning up late if this is the only way I can have a decent breakfast before and not cough my lungs out after a ten-minute jog to where I am supposed to be. Self-care is a daily must for me: I make sure that I am reserving enough time for working out, meditation, journalling and doing things that relax me at the end of a busy day. I bluntly refuse to give up on meals and me time, and I’d rather not share my ideas for school assignments or blog posts before putting them out there. I am not doing the work for anybody anymore, and I am not stepping over my personal values for what other people want. I am entitled to these things – and so are you.
All these little lessons, I’ve learned them through time and am still struggling to implement them in my life, but I am truly grateful for coming across them in the first place. Also, some of the ideas I drew upon here are coming from books, albums and other sources of inspiration that I hold dear, and that I am excited to share more about on the blog in time. For now, feel free to check these titles in the list below and give them a try. I would love if they proved to be as useful and insightful to you as they were to me:
BOOKS:
~ biographical/self-help bits about owning who you are & kicking ass ~
Sarah Knight, You Do You: How to Be Who You Are and Use What You've Got to Get What You Want
Dodie Clark, Secrets for The Mad: Obsessions, Confessions and Life Lessons
Emma Blackery, Feel Good 101
Melanie Murphy, Fully Functioning Human (Almost): Living in an Online/Offline World (okay, haven't finished this one but incredible so far!)
ALBUMS:
~ music that taught me to be both sensitive & strong ~
Taylor Swift, reputation
Lorde, Melodrama
Marina and the Diamonds, Electra Heart
YOUTUBE CHANNELS:
~ internet corners where I find positivity & inspiration ~
Kati Morton
The School of Life
Emma Blackery
Melanie Murphy
Marzia
Hannah Witton
Jusuf
UnjadedJade
xx
Photo source: personal archive. Photo edit: InstaSize.