25 May 2020

The uncharted territory of my 20s

Hint it’s uncomfortable and involves a lot of unlearning the ways of functioning that I’d built up throughout my life. Been broken down now I’m building back up! 
me, attempting to fly a drone
Where do I begin? Maybe with how introspectively uncomfortable I am these days. I’m no longer satisfied with my own status quo of functioning because I’m seeing a better way, but the better way is far off in the horizon. And I’m starting to make a dent towards the better way but it’s hard. It’s like wading full-body through a sticky mess and you keep going forward because you know you get to the other side eventually.

It’s not messy because it’s bad. It’s messy because it’s growth, it’s uncharted, it’s new, it’s figuring things out and making mistakes and learning from them and making a different mistake and feeling frustrated because progress is sloooooow.

The whole mess I’m referring to is the task of trying to carve out a way of living and functioning that’s different from what I've always known. I’ve always been guarded...always? Or was it learned? How much of who we think we are is simply a reaction to the things we’ve experienced? How much of our essence are we already born with? I’m not gonna pretend I can separate the two, but I’m tempted to say that the parts we’re born with are inherently pure and good while the parts we learn can go a number of ways - they can be detrimental or helpful or useful for growth until we outgrow them.

I think we only outgrow the learned parts of ourselves when we're out of the situations that made us learn them in the first place, when life shifts somehow. It doesn’t have to be a life-shattering shift. For me, that shift has been going to university abroad and being “on my own", ie not living in my parents' house, for almost five years. 

And between being away from home, being at school, people I’ve met, experiences I’ve had, my own struggles, and starting therapy, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve seen new ways of being that are different from what I've learned (consciously and subconsciously). Now I have to make a choice about whether I want to continue functioning the way I’d been before or chart a new course.
had this convo with a friend a while back...totally agree with this (s/o to Akwasi)
I’m choosing to chart a new course. I’m not saying I’m completely veering in the opposite direction of where I was always headed. I’m charting a new course in small ways. I want to be less guarded all the time. Less accommodating. I want to advocate for myself more. I want to form my own opinions about things and stand firm in them instead of deferring to other people’s. I want to be able to speak my mind without second guessing myself. And I want to trust my instincts.

It’s funny because I’m tempted to write these off as ‘small things’. Nothing big, just a little self-improvement, right? After all, there are people out here literally recovering from violence and abuse and disaster and other traumatic life events that are far more earth-shattering than me trying to be more outspoken. EXCEPT here’s the thing. I don't think I can set up a comparison like this. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. My self-improvement goals are not small things. This is a different kind of turmoil that’s all internal and all introspective and all inside your head. All constructed almost. But isn’t everything constructed?

Over the years I’ve constructed this sense of self and way of functioning which got me to where I am today. For that, I am grateful. But now that I’m entering a new phase of life, literally on the brink of graduation and the ‘adult world’, some of my past ways of functioning are no longer serving me. It does not do to be accommodating. It’s okay to have wants, needs and boundaries. It’s okay - beneficial even!! - to express these, but this is something I have not had much practice with over the years.

I always thought I was super introspective, and way too self-aware for my own good, but now this lockdown has brought my self-awareness into even sharper focus. It’s almost too much. It’s like I’ve unlocked another layer of self-awareness, where I’m realizing all the ways I can be different but I haven't finished cultivating the tools that would let me be different. It’s uncomfortable as hell.

It’s uncomfortable because I’m noticing the things I want to change faster than I can change them. I guess it’s phase one of being better. You know what they say, the first step to change is self-awareness. Or something like that. It’s just that the self-awareness is pretty uncomfortable when you’re aware that you want to change but aren’t yet changing.

It’s like cognitive dissonance, a term I didn’t really understand until this year. It’s like you’re acting out of accordance with your values/beliefs, so you need to find a way to reconcile things by either changing your actions or justifying your actions to align with your beliefs. I think the dissonance comes in when you can’t reconcile anything, and you’re sitting there in the discomfort.

I suppose I just have to be patient with myself but it's so slow and frustrating. I don’t like being uncomfortable. I want to speed through to the end when I figure it out.

Yet part of what I’ve been learning in my life stumblings is how to be comfortable with discomfort. Because being uncomfortable means there’s an opportunity for growth. If you can only stick through the discomfort and work to get to the other side, it’s worth it.


All I can do is keep moving forward into this sticky mess. Besides, if there’s any time of life that’s allowed to be sticky, it’s your 20s. (But catch me saying this in my 30s too because it turns out that life is never not sticky! Ha. Jokes on me).
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