The end of my 20s

(This post was written a few months prior, and many changes has occured during this period. I'll do another update soon but it will probably take a while)

Life feels meaningful, fulfilling and peaceful recently. It's a nice place to be in mentally. It's rare and it's a fleeting state, I enjoy it as fully as I can while I'm in one right now. Having my boyfriend turn 30 and myself turning 29, it shifted my worldview so drastically. I'd like to think that I did myself justice and I did prepare myself well for my 30s. 

Of course, take away whatever societal achievement I should be hitting by my age right now, I'm not mad for not achieving that. My time was well spent and I wouldn't have come to peace with myself right now if I hadn't taken my time to work on myself. Granted, it had took me way longer than I initially expected myself to take to recover from my workplace trauma, but I'm glad I'm moving on to the next stage of healing now. I'm glad life doesn't need to feel like I'm forever carrying my wounds around, I'm glad that I can come back to being myself rather than to always feel I'm damaged. 

So I'm writing this piece to serve as a reminder of the lessons I've learnt from my 20s:

1. The law of seasons: I embrace the downtime that I needed even if it takes longer than I thought, the process was so painful and so much effort. Because we can't rush whatever that needs to happen. Growth can't happen overnight, healing wounds will take time no matter how advance your skills are. The time that you heal, you stop hurting, you are ready to move on will come, but it's never really on your own terms. But also trusting in the laws of nature that it will come, thing will bloom again one day. But also don't hold on too tightly, seasons come and seasons go. And then it will come again to repeat it's cycle.

2. I'm lucky: I have my growth and peace largely due to luck. Lucky that I have 4 older sister that teaches me wisdom and share experience with me beyond my age, so that I didn't need to go through them myself and learn them the hard way always. I'm lucky to be born with a personality that I always thrive for the best experience and with a personality that people find pleasant that a lot of people were willing to help me even as they don't gain anything. I'm lucky to have a counsellor sister that I can go to with convenience, and having exposed to psychological understanding at a young age, giving myself the tool to help myself. I'm lucky to have good people around me that pulls me up when I'm down. Many people don't have this luxury, this realisation humbles me and makes me realised that I should extend the privilege that I have for others more. 

3. It will forever feel like a work in progress: I'm still feeling inadequate, feeling that I haven't gotten what I want in life. I'm making progress now that I found joy, value and purpose in my work now; but I still feel like I would like to be more than that for myself. I want to be physically fit, to read and enrich my brain, to regularly go to nature and remind myself of the naturist part of myself. I'd like to achieve more too, because I want to feel like how I see myself inside as a most fulfilled form. 

4. Self esteem work is not straight forward at all: back in my YouTube days, the topic I kept doing was self love. Easier said than done especially for people like me who fundamentally at a subconscious level believe that if people don't love me, there's nothing lovable about myself. It's when this idea hurts me (bound to hurt because I expect anyone to  obsessively pour attention at me at all times) that I need to take a hard look at where my impulses comes from and whether they are true. I'm very susceptible to love bombing and trauma bonding because that's what love used to feel like for me (hindsight, it's not love, it's high). I had to learn how to love myself by doing the hard things, to force myself to sit with the disappointment, pain, unworthiness, all the things I don't want to face at all. But they were the most important lesson of all, to accept the parts of yourself that you reject. Once you sit through with them and learn that all those part that you reject isn't that bad, that's how you achieve self love. I recently seek counselling to work on having a more stable self esteem, not knowing really how to get there. But as life challenges me, facing old demons and expectations, I realised all my work to ground myself were useful and realising that I've been through the hard parts before and I can do it again. I trust in myself that I can pull myself through. It's a long way around to build your self esteem. 

5. Aware of your cycle is one thing, to resist it is another: through my serial dating times, I clearly see that I am drawn to quick connections and intense feelings, and largely trauma bonding. Because it will always invoke the side of me that I want to save this person/fix this person. But as I work on myself, I fully understand that I can't fix/save anyone, because only I could help myself by making the difficult choices. I'm still drawn to fix people, but I know I need to resist the urge to go back into this cycle because I know how things would play out. This urge to seek back the drug, to want that validation still stand strong, but you need to know better than to do it to yourself again. 

6. Everything fundamentally means nothing, the only person that matters is you: I held on to my dream to be a dog trainer for so many years even as its torturing me was because I've told everyone about it and people seem to be really rooting for me to do it, I don't want to disappoint them. But at one point, I asked my sister, what if I don't end up doing this? She said that's fine. It was a domino effect for me to think about how many things I held on just because I'm afraid of what people think of me. Now I make choices purely because it makes me happy now, it doesn't even need to align with whatever long term plan of mine. I realise by now that I change my mind too fast too many times to give it so much credit. It's okay to change my mind. 

7. Give what you want to receive: be the change you want to see. I've always believed that no friends actually like me and people don't want to ask me out. I withdraw myself whenever I feel rejected. I hated the feeling of only talking to my friends when I'm in a bad place, I feel like I'm using them. It took me long enough but I realised that I could be a good friend to them right now. I should reach out to share their joy or sadness in their life, if I wanted to receive the same. It changes how i thought my friends think of me, people don't actually hate me, they were just matching my energy. Be a good friend, even if you get nothing back in return. 

8. I have time to work on things: in today's culture, it seems like we need to be doing a million thing at the same time. Just doing one thing at a time is good enough. I'm trying to get back to being a productive human, that's good enough. I don't need to be doing something at all hours in a day. I don't need to be perfect. 

And in time, I might lose my lessons again and might relearn them with additional wisdom. But again, something about a healed life also feels rather boring. It's a whole new phase of life, who knows what new lessons it will bring me.