You Are Enough, May Be Sometimes Too Much
Hope you are doing fine. Time to feel good about yourself. You are a funny guy. Accept that. You have been working on your sense of humor since you started college and it has been 4 years now. You are improving. I heard from your friends and have seen it myself. You laugh is weird, but in a good way, in a fun way. Even when the joke is a PJ, your laugh covers up for it. Your laugh is contagious, you know that? You cheer up everyone with your wide grin. Please never change that.
God how many nicknames you have! Every circle has given you one depending on how you roll with them. Gym boy coz you workout regularly, Shahrukh Khan coz you resemble his giggling, Jacobian coz you didn’t know the answer to a question in maths lecture and you shouted “Jacobian”. Serendipitous for you, the answer was correct and your good luck worked for some more questions too, and that also in the same hour.
When you are with someone, you make sure they never get bored. You want to keep the conversation alive. You are happy all the time and you maintain that wherever you go. How do you do that you energy monster?
People’s judgments don’t cloud your opinion. You are a follower of experimental psychology and it is rooted in your every decision. Even if you take advice from someone, you give it a serious thought before applying and experiment with yours too. This is how you have built so much trust in yourself and this quality is inspiring so many people you don’t know.
Your goals are dynamic. You set achievable goals and increase the target every time you reach a milestone. This is how you build up process-oriented methodology and it helps you breakdown bigger goals into smaller but valuable achievements. You are the live definition of “enjoy the process.”
You are 22 years old and you have a whole life left to improve upon yourself. If there is something you would like to change then here are some suggestions that will make you a better version of yourself. Think of this as advice from two kinds of people: one from your future self, and one from the people you’ve hurt (doesn’t matter if it is knowingly or accidentally).
Meaningful human connections matter in the long run. You should have known this by now. This quarantine period has also taught you that you should never take relationships for granted. And if you want to make even better connections you must hear and acknowledge this.
Some people take judgment in their hearts. It is okay that you are not affected by other people’s prejudice about you but it is not always true the other way around. When you comment on someone’s body image, their speaking skills, their walking skills or maybe just their name, this might be fun for you but they might not interpret the same way you expect them to.
So, think before you speak. And I see that you have been practicing this for the past couple of months. How’s that working out, huh? It is hard to keep your mouth shut, right?
Your two favorite things: eating and talking. Remember when you ate your coworker’s breakfast when she had to attend a meeting? You were convinced that her food doesn’t taste good so you devoured it just because you knew it was nutritious. See, that’s why she hasn’t shared her food with you since then you idiot. And this happened over 4 months ago.
You were raised without a mother and surely that will reflect your actions in every social situation. But if you have come this far, you know that learning never stops. You don’t care about people’s opinions but you still help them, right? This shows you are empathetic and open to looking at the situation from another person’s perspective too.
Your family loves you. You are their favorite. You have the most successful and admired career in your family. But still, as the youngest member, you don’t have to take all the responsibilities in your hand. You are good at calming people down, consoling them and you like doing this for your family too. But give them some chance to improve on their own. No one is perfect and everyone learns with time. This is a natural process of self-healing. You are the youngest one and they might never listen to you. You have tried this many times and had some progress too. But it just damps almost every time. Stop worrying about it so much and let them deal with their situations head-on. Self-awareness builds this way for everyone.
And all the steps you are taking towards self-care, self-awareness, and everything related to self-improvement, keep killing there dude because no one will put this much effort for you. And so many people are learning from you, you know that? That should be enough motivation to pump you.
There is monotonicity and there is consistency: don’t confuse between them. If you follow your daily routine, then you are not monotonous, you are consistent because every day brings new challenges and you crush them by showing up at your prime.
This article belongs to a series of articles I am publishing in this 21-day streak. See the first one here. This is the sixteenth one. 5 more to go…
To read the remaining ones, navigate to the end of the first article where there is a reference list sorted by day number.
~ Sanjeev