So, I’m coming back from my short hiatus earlier than planned: this post should go up on Thursday rather than Monday and as you can see, it’s not university-related but more on that in a bit. This one is a post I’m writing on a whim, late on a Tuesday night after a social outing and one very weird bus drive, as my brain tries to fight off a headache and I struggle hard not to cry. Isn’t that a pretty picture? This is also the first post I’m writing in a while, after dedicating the last couple of weeks to other personal projects and putting up mostly pre-written content on Halo Test. My style might’ve gotten a bit rigid, so please bear with me.
Before I let you on where this blog is heading next, I want to talk about not being good enough – or feeling like you’re not good enough. One kind of feeling many of you might be familiar with to some degree; I, for one, strongly believe that everybody deals with insecurities at some point in their lives. If you haven’t, well, I’m fucking jealous of you. My own insecurities have been on my mind a lot this past week and for a good reason: I’m a week away from going back to university, to my job and reprising my life back in the United Kingdom, also widely referred to on this blog as my ‘second home’.
This month I’ll be starting my third and final year of being an undergraduate student, which could potentially mean the end of my journey in education. But good golly, if that was the only thing I have on my plate the next nine months! I am also working a part-time job, making plans for the near future, working on some personal projects and trying to stay sane while I’m doing all of these. Needless to say, the closer I get to my flight back, the more overwhelmed I feel.
I love being as candid as possible on this platform so I’ll tell you the truth: I’ve been feeling awful recently. I’ve had the worst anxiety I ever experienced, crushing my physical energy and will to work since the very moment I wake up and until I go to bed. It’s so bad that sleep no longer gives me rest, I binge-eat and still feel hungry after and I can’t concentrate on a task for more than ten minutes. Because of that, I feel as though I’m losing all the progress I’ve made this summer with both my physical and mental health. Having spent this summer at home, I chose not to travel much but instead focused on improving myself, getting healthy again and doing things that I would otherwise not have time for during the academic year – and it really has been for the better. I started working out every day, writing on my blog more and taking up some amazing personal projects I wouldn’t have dreamed of coming up with one year ago. But recently, things have been going downhill and that made me feel hopeless.
(source: personal archive)
All in all, my progress feels like nothing to me now. I am objectively aware of how far I’m coming, but I no longer feel the pride and fulfilment that I used to when it came down to it. I don’t feel like I am good enough. A good enough student, a good enough worker and colleague, a good enough daughter and sister, a good enough partner and friend, a good enough writer, a good enough creator, a good enough girl, a good enough person. When I look at everything I’ve gathered under my belt, all I see is the other things I could’ve done apart from it to propel myself further, to be stronger, faster, better. This is not regret, but frustration that I know I can do more, I just haven’t done more for whatever reason at that time. And with this sentiment weighing on my mind, I find it hard to feel confident and hopeful about the upcoming academic year.
I am afraid that everything will go south. I am afraid that I won’t have what it takes to make it through, surpass expectations in terms of grades and just overall performance, and get to a place where not only do I get amazing results that show how much hard work I put into it, but I also obtain a place of secure employment. I am afraid that I will not be able to balance all the departments of my life that I juggle with at the moment, and that feel equally fragile. I am afraid that I will run out of gas and burn out. I am afraid that I will lose support or fail to support others along the way. I am afraid that I will become so engrossed in this one hell of a race lying ahead of me, that I will forget to take care of myself and be happy about this one last year of education that I’m getting.
It might all sound very silly by this point but the truth is, this is the kind of pace I maintained throughout my entire life. Always chasing a goal after another, always investing so much time and energy in all I could get my hands on, to make others happy or to make myself happy, but really never looking beyond my own performance. I’m generally a quiet and shy person, nobody’s ever heard me talk the talk, I’m always about walking the walk without making much noise about it, I love letting results speak for themselves. And this post is anything but a pity party, it’s just a genuine confession that well, I’m fucking terrified of what’s to come. Although I shouldn’t be.
Here, last thing I’d want to do is disperse blame around. What would be the use in it, really? The harm’s been done and I’ve been living the past fourteen years of my life as a toxic perfectionist, being told that I’m ‘overthinking’ and I ‘should give myself a bit of a break’ by literally every single person close to me. The one thing I do want to sort of look at is what I can do in the future about it. Fine, not exactly in the future, more like tomorrow. I want to start breaking down the day’s to-do list into smaller, manageable chunks for me to work with in my own time. I want to value quality over quantity, and do focused rather than lengthy work. I want to manage my use of social media better and protect myself better from its negative outcomes. I want to stop listening to people: if it’s not constructive criticism, it’s noise pollution. I want to listen to myself more. Look out for my physical and emotional comfort, be gentle and patient with myself and wait on myself when I fail to keep up the rhythm. I want to get to a place where I don’t think of myself in terms of ‘good enough’, but in terms of simply ‘good’.
Am I good? Yes, I am. Let’s move on.
Now, about the blog. Halo Test is such a big part of my creative life at the moment and most certainly, content will keep on coming on the blog for at least the next year. I would ideally stick to posting on Mondays and Thursdays, just like I already do, but there is always a chance that you will get one weekly post instead of two if university and my job get crazy at some point. I also have so many other ideas on my plate, ready to go your way so stick around to see those becoming reality!
As far as the kind of content that I want to post is concerned, I consider taking a bit of a break from the University Survival Kit series. Since I made a huge time commitment to keep those coming, I got in a bit of a routine writing and editing them and I felt like the quality of the content was slightly dropping with every new post. I also felt as though they are quite different from the kind of content that I want to see on the blog in the next couple of months (yes, I am still trying to find my niche) so I’d rather ease my transition now and put the series on hold for a while. I am absolutely planning to write posts on the topics that haven’t been touched in the series just yet: improving skills and taking opportunities, culture shock and making memories at university. They will just be a bit dispersed through time but still, look out for those!
Another thing that you might’ve noticed if you were around the past couple of weeks is the ‘Buy Me a Coffee’ button on the sidebar of my blog. The button actually takes you to my Ko-fi page, where you can provide me with a tip if you like the content of my blog and you want to support me in a more personal way. Ko-fi is an outstanding online platform that allows online creators to receive tips from users who enjoy their content, for a symbolical value that is the price of a cup of coffee. Although sharing my posts and engaging with my blog show an immense amount of support by themselves, I am also now providing my Ko-fi profile if you guys wish to have a look!
To end the post on a rather cheerful note, I have some exciting news for those of you who might be even remotely interested in my poetry work: I am having my debut poetry collection, titled Poems Gone Nuclear, coming up this autumn! It will be up on Amazon in both Kindle (e-book) and paperback versions, self-published by me and out for sale possibly halfway through October. I will let you on the details as they come in to me, and maybe even write about what inspired me to write this collection, here on Halo Test. Make sure you look out for that! I do promise it’ll be worth it.
Posts will go up as usually starting this Monday. I ain’t done with yet.
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Photo sources: personal archive.