A New Lesson

 

Source: Pinterest

I want to share the two things that motivated today’s topic. The first one is something a friend said to me as we were answering a trivia question about people that choose to escape their realities or problems instead of facing them. He said I think this refers to you. The second is from an article I read on medium, a quote that left an impression on my mind, and it goes like this when you avoid expressing your feelings, the mind interprets it as dangerous.

When you keep running away from something, the mind interprets it as dangerous.
The Estherian Remix 

 If I can take anything from my pre-teenage years, it would be the simplicity of life. Jon Bellion did well to call it “the wonder years”. There was this safety bubble and the reassuring knowledge that no matter what goes wrong, my father would always come through for me. But as I grew older, I learnt things were not as easy as I thought and my father will not come running to save me. I faced situations and challenges that pushed me beyond my limits and with every new challenge, I got the chance to become a better version of myself. Every new challenge availed me the opportunity to learn something about myself; my flaws, strength, gifts, talents and everything that made me, well, me. The truth is this though, I don’t always rise to every challenge. 

We all know that life can overwhelm you, especially at an age where you are trying to figure things out. It seems like life keeps throwing curveballs after curveballs; tiring routine, annoying people, various happenings that are impossible to wrap your head around, how crippling the uncertainty of life and the desperation for a moment to pause and catch your breath. We sometimes buckle under all the stress and pressure when it is beyond our tolerance level. There is an urge to escape from this exhausting cycle and many people take the escape route, including me.

Source: Pinterest

But we deny ourselves a lot when we do that. We realize we can only put off certain things for a while, and we have to come back to it, eventually. Sometimes our means of escape end up creating problems we didn’t see coming and when we are ready to face it, our mind already termed those things as dangerous (I mean yellow signs and red light level) that we need much more to overcome that challenge. Other times, when we are finally ready to face them, it surprises us how easy it was and feel sad we pushed it off for so long. We can choose to remain deficient in certain areas of our lives, stunt our growth because of how unpleasant growth is, or allow ourselves to grow even if it is not the easiest thing to do.

The most defining thing about the 20s as I have learned is that you are going to run out of excuses and your means of escape is not always going to lead to an escape. While this two event stood out to me as a starting point for this piece, it has become recurring for me especially in the past days, from my email, subscriptions and digest to sermons, and they are saying the same thing, it is time to grow up. 

The Passion Translation
Source: YouVersion bible app

What do you think? 

How often do you feel the need to escape certain situations? 

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Have a beautiful week.

With Love

The Estherian.

You can leave a message for me at theestherian@gmail.com.