If you’re thinking that you’re going to reach a big milestone at a certain age, you’re only setting yourself up for a loss. I think the major reason why most of us feel pressured about being someone great at a young age is because we tend to compare ourselves to others. We see younger people than us become successful at what they do and somehow we get jealous.
We wish to find the easiest route to get to where we are supposed to go. We become impatient and frustrated at how slow our lives seem to progress, all the while forgetting the universal truth that nothing extraordinary magically happens in a day or two. It takes thousands of hours to master any kind of skill.
At this point in our lives, we aren’t meant to figure out exactly who we should be a decade from now. We’re not supposed to know the person that we’re going to marry, the job that we’re going to love until we get old, the color of the house that we’re going to buy, the amount of money we should have to be considered successful. We aren’t obligated to create a straight path that we need to follow through until we die.
Our twenties are destined to be really ugly. This is when we witness how quick things change, and realize that what we are obsessing over right now, might not be the same things that we want in the next few months or years. This is when it occurs to us that crying and whining won’t get the job done, so we’re left with no option but to suck up our feelings and move on. And this is the time when we get to experience the realest, rawest, most painful heartbreak.
We’re all still kids at heart, pretending to be adult, and trying to live up to the expectations that the world summon upon us. We’re allowed to say, “I don’t know. I have yet to learn it.” We’re entitled to receive the time that we need to grow, to improve, to be better. We have the right for our freedom and for the time that we deserve to get to know ourselves more.
We deserve to enjoy the process and feel the pain that we might pick up in our journeys. We deserve to have a break, to laugh, and remind ourselves what’s important to us. We deserve to have fun once in a while and do things that make us feel like a human.
Hard work is good and without a doubt a huge factor in attaining success. But maybe life isn’t all about proving to everyone how great we are at what we do. Maybe life is also about finding out what truly makes us happy and knowing exactly who we are deep inside.
We aren’t supposed to have big names right now. We aren’t supposed to be receiving recognitions and making big speeches and giving autographs to people. We are supposed to find ourselves, be ourselves, and love ourselves. It’s okay if we still don’t have everything that we want – we probably don’t need them all to begin with.
We have to feel okay about our personal stories and know that someday they’re going to change. We need to wait and believe that our time will come and we will be given a chance to change the world and do incredible things. We need to stop planning, overthinking, talking – and just perform.
This might not be the kind of twenties that you have imagined for yourself but life will eventually work itself out in your favor. You just have to put your head down and be focused in learning everything that you need to learn. And hope that your sacrifices, patience, and hard work will soon pay off.
By Angelo Caerlang for TheMindsJournal