There is going to be stretches of time when juggling feels easy-when life feels calm. You don’t one day wake up juggling everything on your plate seamlessly and call it quits. It took me until 29 to realize that balance isn’t an end-goal. When looking through the things I wrote this year and the two years prior, there was one common theme: balance. I spend every birthday writing and then looking over what I wrote the year prior, hoping to find some solace and traces of growth in the last 365 days. Some just choose to share more than others.ģ. We are all struggling, just as we are all succeeding.
Remember that what you see on social media is a cropped, edited, fine-tuned, personally picked out snap shot of what reality looks like for that person. And all of this will fill your bones with envy if you let it. You may see people moving on at a faster speed than humanly possible, and you may see people accomplishing things that you never even dreamed of.
You might see a couple that strategically poses, smiling and laughing at the camera, but you don’t see that deep down, both are unhappy and are together out of comfort. You won’t see parents who feel helpless, as they sit on the sidelines and watch their baby get picked and prodded at for testing, only to come back to inconclusive results. You might see beautiful babies and wonder when is it going to be your turn, but you won’t see that the baby was born with invisible, life-altering health issues that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. You might be looking at a beautiful wedding, but what you did not see are the endless nights that the bride and groom spent up late, frantically calculating if they could meet their budget. Social media is, without a doubt, the world’s most successful magician. Comparison will destroy you if you let it. Why do you insist on being one of them?Ģ. You are going to come across a lot of people in your life who will rip you into shreds. Please don’t mistaken humility for self-loathing, self-love for self-deprecation, self-acceptance for a pool filled with vitriol and gasoline. Please stop telling yourself that you are not good enough or brave enough or strong enough or smart enough or capable enough. This is not what it takes to earn the most important person’s approval: your own. I adopted the attitude that being humble meant taking a pair of boxing gloves and fighting the girl looking at me in the mirror – swinging and kicking and tearing her apart until she became nothing but a stranger with tired eyes and a tethered soul. And so, I began breathing fire at all of the things that I was, and even more so, all of the things I was not. I learned that pride was boastful, that confidence was sinful, that self-worth was shameful. I learned early on that approval was a status symbol – one that could be earned by staying humble, and small, and malleable. And perhaps it’s also number one because it is one that I continue to grapple with, even at 29. Perhaps this truth is sitting high at number one because it is one that takes up the most space in my soul.
Do me a favor: drop the boxing gloves and step away from the ring.
0 kommentar(er)
