26/03
You are great.
The other day, my friend got her driver’s licence. Instead of feeling over the moon about it, she felt like a failure. The reason? She’s 31.
This is something that happens a lot – when people accomplish something a bit later than the “usual” timeframe, they beat themselves up about it. But here’s the thing – my friend had spent her late teens and almost all of her twenties dealing with intense mental illness. She was in and out of the psych ward, she had had her medication changed and messed around with multiple times, and she just plain did not have the energy to be out there taking driving lessons. Heck, half the time she couldn’t even leave the house. Does that make her a failure? Hell no. This human has gone through more tough times than most of us could ever comprehend, and so getting a driver’s licence should have been very far down a personal to do list, far far below “take care of yourself”.
With this in mind, I wanted to write a post encouraging people to Stop. Comparing. Yourself. To. Others.
So you spent your twenties working in jobs you hated and have decided to go to uni to retrain in your thirties? What’s wrong with that? You are NOT BEHIND THE CURVE. You are a person who is taking your life into your hands and making some choices about where you want to go next. Just because your friends went to uni straight out of high school, doesn’t make you any less smart or less worthy. Half my friends who went to uni straight after high school don’t even use their degrees, to be honest.
Maybe you feel like a failure because all your friends have bought their first house and you’re in a share house in your thirties. So fucking what? Maybe they could do that because they have been in the same relationship for a long time and so have the double income necessary to do so. Maybe you’re not in that same situation because you had the strength to leave a relationship that was not right for you. It’s 10000% okay.
All of these kinds of situations where we brutally compare ourselves to others, does absolutely nothing for us. As a human being, you are wonderful and every decision you’ve ever made has been a case of you doing the best thing you could with the resources you had at the time. Too often we look back at stuff in our past and get frustrated with ourselves. But when we do that, we aren’t cutting ourselves a break. We are looking back with the knowledge we have now, and not considering the fact that we had different knowledge, or were not in the same headspace, at the time.
Just please everyone – you are wonderful, you are right where you should be, and you are loved.
Love, Akika xoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxox