Don't Make The Same Mistakes I Did...

A couple of months ago I was at my lowest point in life, I was lost, Falling in a downward spiral with the uncertainty of life ever going back to normal giving me no ground to land on. However one day I decided to give up on hope… Give up on waiting for life to go back to normal… Give up for even the want for solid ground to land on and build up on… But it was in that hopelessness, It was in that presence where I found myself thinking “What if I did this one thing, Took this one step…”. Before I knew it I decided to take another and another till I found I wasn’t falling, I was precariously caught on a branch aside the hole, Above the bottomless pit I had been falling down. Even though I wasn’t falling anymore I was still struggling with the uncertainties, depression, and self hate I had been. It didn’t miraculously go away as portrayed in the many movies and shows we consume in our daily lives. Life is vastly complex, unable to be summarized in an hour and a half long movie or 45 minute episode series. But even though those thoughts and feelings didn’t change and actually got worse, I decided to take another step, And as it got worse I continued to step, And sometimes I would trip and fall but I always found it in myself to get back up…

But because I continued to step even as life seemed to get worse, I became committed, No specific goal, But I was committed. At first I thought I needed to do everything perfectly, I needed to have a rigid schedule planned out and do everything perfectly. Become a human robot. But all that left me was demoralized when I would end up failing, Life happens you fail, Whether it’s because of reasons out of your control or in your control, We all have failed, We all have quit, We all are human. We are not perfect and we’re never meant to be perfect, I would constantly overwhelm myself trying to be perfect and do everything perfectly and it left me more depressed and hopeless when I couldn’t hold up that level of discipline. When I truly started to grow was when I stopped trying to be perfect and I just started to put in work. I consistently would try new things, Sometimes I would fail and sometimes I would succeed, But either way I would always have learned something. Overtime I became almost desensitized to failing, Yeah it still sucks to fail but I wasn’t afraid of it. I began to be able to learn rapidly, And over time I built a respect for learning, That at one point I never had. See at a young age I understood the concept of death very well. I used to look at the term “Life Long Learner” in a very nihilistic way. Why commit your life to learning if you’re just going to die I would ask myself constantly. But what I failed to understand and realize was in order to grow in life you must learn and in order to be happy you must constantly grow and be better than you once were. Not that that’s the only thing but it’s a main thing in our lives and our happiness heavily depends on it…

I began to adopt this ideology of becoming a lifelong learner, Committed to constantly learning and improving upon myself, and because everything I did was in order to learn, I could put 100% into everything that I did. Because there was no fail in it, It was either succeed and learn or fail and learn, Overtime instead of life getting worse it got better, Not to say there weren’t relapses and fall offs along the way, Even some points where I felt stuck, But I found in those moments if we continue to push and even push harder in those moments there's something great about to come out of it, The moment where your on the brink of something great even though you can’t see it yet are the moments where life will test you the most to see if your worth what you are about to receive, When your down and almost out keep pushing I promise you’re on the brink of something great. With my commitment to constantly learning and improving, growing, I started to realize how much what we fuel our minds with on a daily basis affects us, So I began to slowly replace the negative stuff I would do, say, and listen too in my daily life, Like watch YouTube or Netflix, Scroll through TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. It had gotten so bad at one point my screen time daily average was 14 hours. 14… And what I realized was not only is this a huge waste of time, And most of the stuff I was watching was negative, unimportant, garbage that won’t get me anywhere in life. But that I literally couldn’t go through life without some sort of distraction, I was either glued to my screen watching something or needed something playing in the background while I did something, I couldn’t sit in silence, I couldn’t even think straight half of the time… Between the constant distractions in my life and lack of sleep and countless other factors I was a drone most days, Unable to think clearly most of the time and the moments where I could only shedded light on the countless hours of blurred reality where life seemed to have whizzed by only adding to my unbearable suffering… Silence used to make me depressed, anxious, or bored. Especially when my internal narrative was negative and self hating. The saddest part being most of the time it wasn’t even enjoyable watching or listening to what I had on, It was just stimulating enough to be better then the silence…

In realizing that I was constantly distracting myself, I knew that I needed to give myself time to think and work through the depression and self hate I had been struggling with, I started to spend more time with myself, While also replacing my negative habits and things I would watch and listen too with positive things, Listening to podcasts and stories of successful people while I work on projects and other things, While also spending hours working on projects in silence just thinking, Knowing very well we are what we do on a daily basis, I knew that replacing the mindless garbage I’d watch and listen too with positive things while also giving myself time to just think and work through things while being productive could completely change my mindset on a day to day basis and bring clarity not only in my mind but into everything in my life and it did. After weeks of slowly changing the things I fuel my brain with while also giving myself daily silence and time to think away from distractions, I was able to change self hatred into love for myself, Depressive and nihilistic thoughts into hopeful ones, While I’m still not 100% on exactly what I want to spend the rest of my life doing as we probably all aren’t, I’m grateful to say that I’m in the best physical and mental shape of my entire life, While I’ve gone through a lot to get here, I’m here, Ready to continue improving no matter what life throws next, Because you’re never done improving. I leave you with this, Be grateful for where you are no matter where you are and never stop improving and striving for more! And don’t ever forget that I love you!