You can tell when you are in a competitive environment when everyone around you is either working or thinking about what else they should be working on. The reasoning that I believe fuels this kind of culture is if you consistently work, you will be successful. That belief can negatively or positively affect a person depending on how they perceive it. However, in high school, I didn’t take that reasoning in a positive light, and my world wasn’t as optimistic as it could have been.
I never felt like I was doing enough. That only led me to work even more, but sometimes, my head was not in the right place to do my school work to my fullest potential. I didn’t have a purpose that fueled my motivation to keep on working because I didn’t take the time to really understand what I wanted from myself. At some point, I realized I was doing all this work because everybody else around me seemed like they were doing the same thing.
All that I knew at that moment in time was that I wasn’t prioritizing myself when I was living this way. Nonetheless, that kind of lifestyle I was following spread to college, but I knew I couldn’t live like this forever. I wanted to embrace who I fully wanted to become instead of restricting myself to only do work towards fulfilling a role of who I was supposed to be to everyone else. That required me to allow myself to spend time discovering the different facets of who I was and who I could become.
The first step that I needed to take was to recenter my thoughts. That meant I needed to take a step back and reflect on how I was perceiving everything around me. In the process of doing so, I noticed that I thought work was an obligation and not something that you could be excited about. Since I didn’t put the time in to understand what kind of work was interesting to me, I was doing work that was not fulfilling what I wanted out of my life. I needed to reconfigure what the definition of work was in my mind so that I could start spending time on things that I loved doing.
Over time, I understood what caught my attention when I was doing work for the college courses I was taking. I also started to hear what my mind and my body wanted to do and made the time out of my days to do those hobbies that brought me joy. The beneficial part of this decision was that I was even more motivated to do academic work when I made time for myself to do other activities as well, which is the complete opposite of what I did in high school. I felt more rejuvenated when I realized that I was making that change to reconnect with the different facets of my identity. Now, not only do I see myself as a computer science student, but I am also a dancer and a writer who is passionate about wellness!
If there is one thing that I want you to take away from this article is that you don’t need to restrict yourself to only do one thing. If you want to connect with yourself more, take the time to do the things that you love doing so that you can embrace the multifaceted person that you are.
