Life has been crazy recently. At least for me, 2023 is not giving me a break but rather a run for my money. This year has already brought me both love and loss, success and failure and also stress and happiness. That’s the thing about life, it’s a continuous cycle of ups and downs. As I’ve come across this more recently this year, I realized that those people who are close to you are there for you even when you aren’t doing physically or emotionally well.
It’s not that people were never here for you, but whether we as individuals realize it. When times get hard the easier thing to do is isolate yourself, work on things yourself, and stay away from bothering others with your problems. But taking a step back, what does that really accomplish?
After learning isolating is not a productive form of healing, the hard way of course, I began to reach out to the people I am closest to, learning that it is ok to not be okay. Being vulnerable is an ok thing to do, and putting myself in that position has opened me up to pieces of advice from friends and family that have helped more than I can explain.
“Don’t be so hard on your mental”
As I have mentioned, life is full of ups and downs and filled with so many emotions. Those emotions become extremely heightened when the mind takes a course of its own, a little thing we love: overthinking. We spend so much time pondering on what we could have done better, invalidating our own emotions and overanalyzing situations into something they are not.
I spent a period of weeks in this phase, tearing down myself and destroying my mental health. On the way to school, my boyfriend said this to me, and it has stuck with me ever since. We can spend our lives being our biggest haters, if we constantly criticize ourselves we come to a point where we don’t believe we can do much better. Although that’s not the case at all, you must be patient with yourself. The patience and empathy you give out to other people also deserve to be given back to you.
“If you aren’t willing to say hi to them in public, then why do you follow them?
Social media comparison is one of the biggest challenges placed upon our generation today. When thinking about this, a lot of people believe I’m talking about a comparison between them and influencers or fitness models. That’s not exactly the people I mean. Our social media is filled with people we went to high school with, friends of friends, and someone you don’t actually know personally but know on a different level. Those are the people not needed in our feed.
Social media is where we document most of our lives, the little things we want others to see we are doing, and what we believe makes us look more desirable. You do it, I do it and so do all those people you follow. Now put that in perspective these are the same posts that individuals sit and ponder on wondering if other people have more interesting fun life experiences. In reality, everyone has their struggles and bad days those are just the highlights.
That comparison is just not needed though. Those are people that place no value in life experiences yet cause you to think less of your own life. If you wouldn’t go up to someone in a grocery store and ask them how life is, then why do we need to know through social media, in all reality we don’t.
“The lord works in mysterious ways”
2023 has brought a lot of loss in my life, this past week especially. A few weeks prior to our annual coffee debrief a good friend had mentioned this to me. Later that day we attended a faith and worship event which touched a lot upon keeping that faith in God. Later that night I received the news a family member had passed, I spent hours just wondering, why me? I quickly came to realize that God gave me this battle because he knows I am strong enough to face it.
Struggles may come along, but they are not there to kick you down but rather to build you up, making you into a stronger individual the Lord knows you can become. This path you are put on is yours for a reason, and every bump in the hill or joy in life is intended with purpose.