The last three years have been nothing short of a rollercoaster–to say the least. The mindset I had in 2015 is completely different from the mindset I now have, entering 2018. In 2015, I knew I wanted to go to grad school, but was battling with the decision to keep living in Hawaii or to move away. My living situation was chaotic, and I hated coming home. I was in a one-sided emotional relationship, blinded by false hope. Worst of all, my job caused me to develop anxiety, insomnia, and depleted my sense of self-worth and confidence.
Through all this, I learned something very important about myself: Being vulnerable is not one of my strong points (hah, ironic). Dictionary.com defines vulnerable as being “susceptible to physical or emotional attack or harm”. By the end of 2015, I reached the pinnacle of emotional vulnerability when I knew I was going to lose my job–and the shame of this caused me to internalize all my feelings. Coping with my thoughts and emotions during this time period, as well as the notion that I was losing control of the direction I thought my life was supposed to go in, is still one of the hardest things I’ve had to do.
But, I’m a quiet fighter. Events I experienced in my early life caused me to become a resilient child; (click here for a better explanation of what resilient children are). So, I had to look at this new challenge in my life no differently. I cut the individuals out of my life who were weighing me down, moved out of my chaos and into a home with new people, accepted a lower-level job that was willing to take a chance on me, and enrolled into an online Master’s program so that I had flexibility while learning.
Three years later, I’ve felt my life shift 180 degrees:
- Two years of emotional healing has caused me to love myself–I appreciate the person I’ve become, and who I’m growing into. I developed enough self respect to never allow myself to wallow in a hopeless situation ever again. (I’m still working on the vulnerability part though…)
- The people who I live with have become my hānai family, and will always hold a special place in my heart. I thank them for embracing me into their lives, especially when I was at my lowest.
- You know how people say you’ve really healed when you can talk about an incident and not get upset? I’ve realized that growth is a process, to stop being so hard on myself. Mistakes are a part of learning, and it’s okay to take initiative and ask for help.
The first half of this post had been sitting in my blog’s queue for about 3 months… Why? Because I was waiting for the “perfect” time to hit Publish. I wanted everything in my life to be juuuust right, before I made it public. Funny enough, during this time, I learned one more important lesson about my “come up”:
I’m a hopeless idealist. Emphasis on hopeless. And that is most definitely my biggest flaw.
I am calling myself an idealist, because perfectionist is too much of a black-and-white term. I see things for the way that they “should” be. Or worse, how they “could” be.
This causes me so much dissonance, because–as I’m continually learning–my life never goes as expected. Everything isn’t going to be synced and in order at the same time. There’s never going to be a “perfect” time to hit publish.
I use to see this as a form of failure. Stressing myself out because I felt like I was coming up short, especially when comparing my progress to that of others.
But that’s where the “hopeless” part of my idealistic nature comes in, ha. The one saving grace I have for myself is that no matter how shitty of a deck life decides to deal me, I always, always believe that everything happens for a reason. The right things will occur in their right time. And they will.
I’ll just leave this post with a line that stuck out to me from Dear White People, V2:
“So the world isn’t acting the way you thought it would. But we don’t see things the way they are. We see them the way we are.”
So, here’s to taking back my narrative, y’all.
🙂