My best years are ahead of me
Reflections on turning 33
Writing this has been a yearly ritual for a while now.
I re-read my entries for the past three years. I tend to cringe when I look back at the person who wrote those entries, but I found last year’s to be particularly reflective and accurate, even till today:
I have learned that life does not unravel in spectacular fashion once I have found myself. I had the naivety to believe that once I have found myself and my meaning, everything will fall into place. I was very wrong. It only opened my eyes to the gigantic mess I have to navigate through in order to have a stake in my dreams. Life gets harder, not easier.
This is still true, only at a much more pronounced level. The past year has been nothing short of spectacular for me. I am typing my words into the very platform which I am profoundly blessed to work on. How does one proclaim that she wants to be a storyteller and is given the exact opportunity to do so? What happens when a person is handed everything she needs to fulfil her life’s work on a silver plate?
Everyone presumes the answer to those questions would be — the said person would live happily ever after. I have the brutal honest answer instead:
It is extremely paralyzing.
I can no longer lament about my circumstances or that I had not been given the luck that I need. I can no longer say that the world has failed me. The world delivered her promise. Ask for what you want, I’ll hand it to you, and now you have to live up to your promise, I heard her say.
I get to live at where I want and work on something I fervently believe in. There’s nothing more I can ask for externally, so I drove my asking internally instead:
What have I done to deserve this? Do I deserve this? How can I grow stronger so I can be that person worthy of such gifts? How can I pay this forward? What can I do in my capacity to ensure that more people get to experience what it truly means to be alive?
These questions haunt me every single day, if not for every single split-second. From the day I was handed the things I asked for, I no longer belonged to myself. I gave myself to the world, because she has given everything she could to me. That was the only way I can truly feel alive, be alive, have the integrity to carry on and not harbor any guilt because I know I am privileged.
But life is a paradox. It is never linear nor logical. There is no 12-step guide where we faithfully do everything in sequence and things will fall into place. It is not as simple as — I am going to work as hard as a bull, give myself entirely and I will be doing what that is required of me.
The paradox lies in the distribution of power, which is one of the most important lessons I have learned in the past few years. Giving myself entirely to anything indicates an unequal distribution of power. This is where it gets counter-intuitive. To fulfil our own potential, to be at maximum capacity, requires seeing ourselves as equals to the entities we are serving. We want to give something that is of value. How can the other party receive something valuable when us as givers, see ourselves as less than them?
How can other people draw strength upon us, when we are only but empty shells having given everything away?
Who do we turn to when we need help? We turn to people who are pillars of strength, not people who are tired all the time because they spent too much energy giving away parts of themselves. We are not robots. There is no way we can be creative, strong sustaining individuals with a capacity for other people to lean on when we do not set aside time to recharge and nurture ourselves.
You may think that is obvious. But it wasn’t obvious to me at all. It was a hard lesson to learn, and I am still a long way from learning it. After years of self-demeaning, it is extremely difficult to see myself as worthy of anything, much less equal. My instincts drive me to burn-out territory all the time, because that was the only way I knew to seek self-validation. I was constantly disapproving of myself all the time before even others have a chance to disapprove of me.
To spend all that mental and emotional energy critically analyzing my self —which to be fair, is precisely because I demand nothing but the best from myself — is exhausting. It is not only exhausting to me, it is exhausting to any entity that interacts with me, because before they can get to me, they have to get past the obstacles I put in front of me. Instead of spending time obsessing over whether I deserve to be a contributor, perhaps I should just contribute. Obsessively thinking whether I deserve something or not (or to other people), is ironically a form of insecure vanity, as I have realized.
I am learning to just be. Just be me. To honor not only my weaknesses but my strengths. To understand what it means to have power without needing it to be given to me. To know that power is given, not taken. To not tie my identity to any external entity but to build upon it myself. That everything is temporary and is constantly evolving or destructing but I am still me at the end of it. That my life’s work will still be what I will choose to do regardless of the circumstances I am in.
On my own site, I wrote, “When I grow up, I want to be a storyteller”. I thought I wanted to become one, because I didn’t know how I could tell stories well. Yet it became obvious to me that I didn’t need to grow into one, because I was always one. Whether it was the young kid writing essays in school, or the designer who sought to tell her client’s stories through the design of their landing pages — I have always been a storyteller. The desire to share stories is what makes people storytellers, being good at it is secondary.
I just didn’t know it yet.
As I wrote the previous year,
At 30 I have found myself, at 31 I discovered the meaning of life, at 32 this year, I am learning that finding myself and the meaning of life is only a small step towards a long and winding road ahead.
Now at 33, I am learning to be truly me, to not only be comfortable in my own shoes, but to know where and how I should walk them, the weight I am allowing them to bear, and when I should take them off.
Being alive is not only about executing my life’s work, but to actually truly experience being with myself, without any act, thought, idea, emotion, words, requirements or achievements having to exist in any given moment.
Life can only get richer ahead of now, because only now I am walking this earth as myself, not as an identity constructed by the norms around me. It took me thirty-three years to get here, to understand life is beautiful because of lucid moments of both joy and heartbreaks, that the full spectrum of colors exist because of light and darkness; I am me because I have multiple fragmented personalities all bundled into one.
Happy thirty-three years of life, and an amazing three years of being alive, to me. Thank you for witnessing these years alongside me.
