Lessons From 2021
Something I was conscious of doing this year was to write down the things I learnt in the year, even if the processes involved in learning those lessons were not served in platters of gold or found on the smoothest of rides, I am so grateful for these lessons because they helped me in the process of becoming. This is going to be a long list, so strap yourself in.
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1. Burnouts are inevitable if you don't know when to rest.
I would say this is the most important lesson I learnt this year seeing that I was burnt out early in the year after concluding my exams and to be honest, I will say I am still recovering from the aftermath of that burnout. I will say maybe it became a transition of sorts, it was so bad and exhausting, and I hope to never find myself in such a situation again.
2. Rest is not a luxury, it is a necessity.
Just to show how important the first lesson was, I learnt to stop saying I can’t afford to have a rest. I mean, burnout is way worse because you would be unable to get even the tiniest thing done. So I learn not to wait for the perfect or more opportune time to take a break but to find a way to incorporate that rest in my day-to-day schedule.
3. Sit down with your feelings and listen to what they have to say.
I know I wrote a blog post about this earlier this year and I found out that if you refuse to listen to yourself if you refuse to sit down with the way you are feeling, you are inevitably causing yourself to suffer. Allow yourself to feel, whatever emotion, stop describing your feelings as bad or good. And also there is a lot of clarity that comes with introspection.
4. A part of you is not you.
I saw this in a book and I agreed with its meaning. Your heart is not you, your lungs are not you and in the same vein your anxiety is not you, your clumsiness is not you, your fears are not you, and you need to stop reducing yourself to some parts of you. You are you, regardless of your fears, or any other flaw you see. So stop defining yourself by those things.
5. God always comes through if you allow him to.
I don’t think I have a lot to add here, but all through this year, I have lost count of the number of times I needed things done or times I felt stuck in certain situations and positions and God always came through for me. Although in the beginning, I had to struggle with leaving things in God’s hands.
6. Everyone has something to teach you, be willing to learn.
7. Sometimes all you need to do is start.
Stop waiting for the perfect moment. Also when it comes to the things you want to do, don't give in to external pressure. Start when you are ready.
8. Beauty is in the littlest things and tiniest moments, and life is in the grand little things.
9. My feelings for anyone is my responsibility, never theirs.
It is easy to project the responsibility of the way I felt towards someone as their problem. And I stood outside the fence a lot of times telling myself, I feel this way about this certain person, and they have to help me deal with it because it is their fault. I saw this line in a Medium article at the start of the year, and it helped me put in perspective that no matter what I feel towards someone, I have to deal with it myself. Be it anger, happiness, disgust or love. My feeling towards that person is my responsibility and I get to deal with it however is best for me.
10. Be in the now, be here.
Maybe I get to talk about this more next year, but towards the end of the year, I found myself thinking about a lot of things, especially the ones yet to come, and it was quite impossible to think about the future without realizing that one day, everything is going to change and there is nothing I can do about it. But a friend told me that if I dwell on that, it is going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And his advice is to be here, to be in the moment, to savour it because ultimately if you hold on to what might be too much, you never get to enjoy what is.
11. Be filter-less with the people you love, and you want to have a deeper relationship with.
Stop putting up an appearance and stop having layers or building up walls around yourself. And I know how secure it feels putting up the defence because you are scared of making the same mistake or risking it all for the wrong person. But if you want a real relationship, you have to open up, you have to remove all the filters and walls you have put up. And it takes being brave and if I have learnt anything this year, I am not brave, not in the slightest, but I am learning this, and I am taking each step with a lump in my throat and I believe it gets easier with each step.
12. Be your most authentic self always.
13. Cry if you have to. I cried a lot this year, so if you haven’t at all, here is your permission to.
14. Sometimes you just need someone to listen to you and tell you it is going to be alright. Other times, even knowing it is going to be alright doesn't ease the pain.
If there is anything I learnt after getting into a quarrel with a friend this year, it is that silent treatment breaks me. So don’t do it, don’t ignore the people you care about or the people that care about you just to prove a point. Take it a step further and always check in with them to know how they are doing. And the stupid thing about that quarrel was, we misunderstood each other.
16. Beloved, be loved.
This came in the form of a meme this year, but it is true, allow yourself to be loved. Stop holding on to regrets, pain, past mistakes and experiences. Love yourself and allow yourself to be loved.
17. Love will find you, even when you have given up on it, especially when you think you are not worthy of receiving it. But what you do after is the most important thing.
18. Just because you didn't struggle for something doesn't mean you shouldn't be proud of it.
In a culture that lays so much emphasis on the hustle and struggling to make something, it is easy to feel like you should not celebrate it. Be proud of whatever you are building and who you are becoming, struggling for something shouldn’t be the criteria for how much value it has, or if that thing is truly worth celebrating.
19. Allow people to help you when you need help, sometimes being self-reliant is not a good thing.
20. If it costs you your peace, you can't afford it.
21. You can't do life alone.
This is a recurring lesson. You need friends to pull you through, to hold you down and ground you. You need your family, be it biological or not, you need a community to be a part of and the most beautiful thing is that you get to decide how close or how much ease you put into developing all these human connections and interactions. Just as you need someone to accompany you through life, share your joy, ease your pain, the reward here is that you get to do the same for the person. And as a Christian, you get to have the Holy Spirit holding you through life and guiding you, if you allow him to.
22. Loneliness is a gift, an uncomfortable gift, though. Loneliness reveals self and commands your presence.
This is one thing I didn’t expect to learn this year, and boy did I learn. When all you have to turn to is yourself, you begin to learn about yourself. I will say I have a better understanding of myself this year because there was this atmosphere of loneliness that always crept up on me. It was overwhelming most of the time and deeply uncomfortable, and I was always on the lookout for a means of escape. But at the moment I saw my loneliness as a gift, I was able to channel it into something better and beautiful. I became more aware of myself and yes, loneliness forces you to be present in your own life.
23. And the truth shall set you free.
24. You can't eat your cake and have it. You can't have it for too long, else it will spoil.
I stole this line from Dave, I think. Learn to take risks. Playing life safe is no guarantee against loss, you can hold on to something for so long and still lose it. So take that risk, tell that person you love him/her, the perfect moment doesn’t exist forever, and the perfect moment might never come. It is true, you can’t eat your cake and have it, but you can’t have your cake forever either.
25. Learn to say no without any regret.
26. When you talk about your past self, always remember you might have done a foolish thing, but you were not foolish. Learn to look at your former self with grace, learn to separate your mistakes from your person. You are a person and not your mistake. And if we are being honest with ourselves, the decisions we made in the past were to the best of our capacity or knowledge, and it is only now that we know better. Also, forgive yourself.
27. You can be more and sometimes you get to define more.
28. It’s OK if things don't go according to plan. See the beauty in serendipity.
This is something we find out somewhere along the way that things never go the way we plan them. Having a plan is good and trying to follow that plan is good, but what we do when the plan goes awry is the problem. Most times I sulk and feel so sad that something did not work out the way I wanted, but I learnt that it is OK. It is OK for the plan to fall apart, the most important thing is the destination. And so be open to seeing the beauty in things not going according to plan, see the beauty in serendipity.
29. License without parameters is irresponsibility.
Most times when we allow people into our lives or when we give people the go-ahead to be, we somehow find it difficult to tell them what they shouldn’t do because we don’t want to feel like we are being restrictive or raining on their parade, at least I feel that way. But imagine giving someone the license to drive without ever telling them the rules of driving, you will find a lot of accidents occurring every day. So if we as humans know that there are rules guiding things as basic as driving, we should also know that it is irresponsible on our part to give someone the go-ahead without first laying the parameters, guidelines or boundaries. And honestly, as we mature, we begin to see the importance of boundaries and limits.
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Until next time,
The Estherian.
The part where you talked about giving license to our lives without the rules, I can totally relate.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't end well but then it's hard to give the rules, maybe because we don't want to hurt the person at the beginning. Whereas, at the end we all get hurt.