It has been a tough school year to say the least. In many ways, finishing the year off feels more sweet when I’m finally leaving it behind, but I’m still at a point where nothing is really that sweet. As I’m wallowing in my pre-exam stress and existential crises, I have attempted to take the chance to reflect on the year and see where I might have improved to make everything slightly more easy for myself. It’s hard to know in the moment, so reflection helps me identify areas of weakness and what I can focus on to change during the summer.
Don’t Lose Sight OF personal habits
Things get hectic during the harder years and this was no exception for me. Balancing a job, club leadership, a bigger workload, and social obligations was not my easiest feat this year. As much as I feel like I accomplished in this balance, I lost sight of some of my smaller, more helpful personal habits that I had implemented in my day-to-day life previously. Over last summer, my peace was at its peak as I meditated every single day. Although I still find time to do daily stretches and listen to calming noises and frequencies in my post-workout regimen, I’m not nearly as spiritually connected to myself as I was when I meditated every day. The difference is intention, considering the fact that I realistically should have 5-15 extra minutes in every day to intentionally sit down, get rid of distractions, and focus on the moment with a guided meditation.
Getting swept up in daily obligations truly makes it feel like there’s never enough hours or even minutes in the day. At least that’s what I thought before I realized that any down time I had in the day was dedicated to watching Youtube or scrolling on TikTok, and then I realized I wasn’t spending that down time with intention. I can still scroll or rot to my heart’s content even if I took out a few minutes of my day to meditate, it’s just hard to conceptualize when I feel like there’s no time to complete anything I need to do. Slowing down in this way not only gives me perspective on these exact situations of anxiety, but it’s also a daily moment for me to be with myself, and how special is that?
Being Perfect Is NOT always sustainable
Before this year, I never procrastinated. I had anxiety surrounding schoolwork and the second anything was assigned, I would immediately start working on it and had it done before the due date. Of course, I want my gold stars for that phase of my life; I was working hard, managing my time effectively, and doing a good job with my effort. This year has not been the same. It might be the addition of a part-time job into the mix, but regardless of what it is, this year turned me into a procrastinator. I left a lot of things until the last minute, I avoided things that didn’t have strict deadlines, and I didn’t always put my best foot forward in terms of the effort I put into assignments (sorry Mom and Dad…). I’ve been getting down on myself about this a lot recently, because studying for exams requires a lot of catch up on the things I put off until the last minute, all while my motivation is still at a huge low.
As much as I want to focus on better prioritization, like maybe not making the gym a priority when I have 2 books to read and a paper to write, I also want to give myself grace. It’s been good to have a boundary with myself when it comes to getting work done as soon as I can in the past, but I know that the addition of so many facets in life makes that a bit unsustainable. Although I will try my best to motivate myself, I know it’s worth cutting myself some slack and realize that there’s still credit due to myself for trying.
Maybe therapy should be higher up on the to-do list
I have always been pro-therapy when it comes to myself. Stigma surrounding that sort of thing never existed in my mind, if anything, I felt like it was pretty cool that I was so emotionally aware that I wanted to work through my feelings. All this considered, I keep wondering why I won’t just go back to therapy? This has been a big year of my life and has brought up a lot of things I want to work on. Considering I’m on a university campus in this decade, it’s not like resources are inaccessible.
The issue of this matter is related to my problem with meditating. I always think there’s never enough time in a week for me to carve out an hour to work on whatever I’m going through… is there? That kind of thinking has managed to prevent me from taking the initiative for the entire school year, but when I frame it the way I am right now, it seems a bit ridiculous. It’s one hour that I don’t have class or work or doomscrolling to attend to, so maybe it should be higher on my priorities.
fomo sucks, but so does not getting your beauty rest
For as long as I can remember, my fear of missing out has been a considerable barrier that I’ve had with myself. I need to be where everyone else is and I couldn’t bear the idea of people having fun without me. Of course, that’s (mostly) hyperbolic, but my FOMO is still bad! This year I pushed myself so far over my social limit that I could hardly recall the last time I got more than 7 hours of sleep a night for a whole week. I wanted to soak in the moments, but my reflections have revealed that it may be a little bit deeper than that. Considering I was juggling so many things that made me so busy throughout the year, I think I may have partially been trying to prove to myself that I could maintain a social life with everything else happening. It was not the way to go.
Proving to myself that I could be as social as ever with added stressors and schedule impositions, that resulted in the sacrifice of a lot of valuable personal time and more importantly, sleep. On the rare nights that I get enough sleep, the difference in my energy levels the next day is high and I always want to conquer the day. The other big factor that I’ve thought about is the fact that many of these nights I succumbed to my FOMO, I didn’t even feel like I would have missed out on much. Sometimes, nights out or social events are not that fun, but it’s harder to accept when you gave up important recharge time for it. If anything, there may be a correlation there considering the fact that being tired makes you have less energy for those events. Mind-blowing, I know.
There was a lot that I learned this year from a busier schedule, but that didn’t take away from the amount of fun I had. I still had great support, I love what I’m learning, and there are always things to be positive about. The biggest lesson I needed to learn was that I’m too hard on myself. It’s okay to have standards for yourself, and it’s also not the end of the world if those standards need to change based on circumstance. Being kind to myself makes me more excited to improve on all of these points instead of letting the self-consciousness take over my brain. The year is almost over, so I can take a breath and work on the things that are important to me.