This year, most of my high school graduating class will walk across their post-secondary institution’s stage, beaming as they receive their hard-sought-after diplomas and degrees. My best friend will proudly pose with her University of Toronto Honours degree, and I will be there with her, celebrating her victory. One thing I will not be doing, however, is posing with my own. If I could somehow visit my eighteen-year-old self and tell her how my life would one day be, she would argue against my words. How could she, someone who had been dreaming of attending the University of Toronto since childhood, believe that she would drop out of the University merely several months into her program? She would deny this news and assure me that she would not graduate a year after her classmates–she was too competitive to be left behind. And yet, here I am: a 22-year-old psychology student in her third year, scrambling to take all the necessary classes I need to hopefully graduate in June 2019. Also, three years into my undergraduate degree, I only now realized that while I do enjoy the idea of psychology, it is not a career I wish to pursue and for this reason, I will most likely be applying for a second Bachelor’s degree once I graduate from my current studies.
Sometimes, we need to acknowledge our weaknesses if we wish to experience self-growth. For me, it has been recognizing my tendency to be competitive and jealous. Throughout my life, I have compared myself to others: in grade school, I was jealous of my closest friends for being lean with clear skin and all the boy’s hearts wrapped around their little fingers. In high school, I was jealous of all the girls who seemed to attract friendships and relationships wherever they went, the confidently loud and extroverted girls who could move to a seemingly deserted island and still find a way to make friends. In university, especially during my first two years, I was jealous of all the wanderlust enthusiasts on social media who despite being in their late teens and early twenties, somehow managed to afford traveling to all the places I could only dream of. More recently, I became jealous of all the people around me who were in seemingly loving, committed relationships while I watched pitifully from the sidelines, too socially awkward and insecure to even attempt flirting with the opposite sex. Now, I face the challenge of graduation: as June approaches, Facebook and Instagram posts will actively remind me that I could have, would have, should have been graduating–but I am not.
Fortunately, who I am today is significantly different from who I was in high school and while the ultra-competitive, nagging 18-year-old will try her best to guilt me into feeling like a failure, I will stand tall and proud of where my decisions have taken me. Admittedly, there are many things I would do differently if given the chance, and many people would say the same if asked, but if I never made the decisions I did, I would not have been the person I am today. The person I am now is someone who has fought tremendous battles within herself; battles with mental illness and social isolation, battles with low self-esteem and little self-worth. These were battles I faced, battles that almost drove me to a breaking point beyond return, and yet they are battles I won. Today, I can truthfully say that I am more compassionate and closer to self-actualization because of the hardships I have faced. If I never had to experience the difficulties I did, I would have been oblivious to the pain and suffering that many people sadly deal with every single day of their lives and thus I would not have been as committed to helping others.
As my friends’ graduation rolls around, I will wish them the best of luck in their endeavours and I will continue to work on myself. We are raised in a highly individualistic society that encourages people to be competitive; it is a society that urges people to be smarter, faster, leaner, wealthier, more extroverted, and so forth. It is easy for those of us who “fall behind” to feel like losers, as if we can’t get back up once we have “fallen”. However, what we need to understand is that this life is not a race. The competitive mentality we live by is merely an illusion that exists to keep us competing against one another. Truthfully, each of our life experiences is unique, and for this reason, we encounter the challenges and receive the rewards we need for our own growth. We cannot compare ourselves to the people around us because they are walking their own path; while we can briefly join them, eventually the path will diverge, and we will need to respond to different demands. Some of us will follow the four-year model and graduate at the age of 21/22, get a job right out of school, meet someone, fall in love and get married by 25. Others will go on to pursue graduate studies and maybe even earn their PhD. Others already began their careers by opting out of further education; and some of us, myself included, will take a few years longer than everyone else to figure out what they want to do with their lives, but once they do, they’ll know they have found their calling. Some of us will be single adults who still haven’t had a relationship, while others will discover that their high school sweetheart is the love of their life. Some will be young parents, others will choose not to have children, and the list goes on.
So, if you find yourself rushing to keep up with everyone, try to remind yourself that the best thing you can do is focus on your own prosperity: find what makes you happy, what gives you purpose and drive, and work towards it at your own pace. If you are dealing with personal issues, seek the resources you need to help you get back on your feet. Most importantly, remember that those individuals you admire and compare yourself to are too busy following their own dreams and working on their own lives to notice that you are “behind”. And those that do notice are usually trying to hide their own insecurities. To quote the British philosopher Alan Watts, “The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” From one work-in-progress to another, I want to gently remind you to just be alive.