Freeing You from Yourself
One day, instead of adding more shit to my to-do list, I deleted it.
I deleted the list on my phone. I deleted the reminders. I disregarded the notebooks, journals, planners, chedulers, agendas…
I just figured, if it is that important, I’ll remember to do it. And that was honestly the beginning of freeing me from myself.
There was a time last year when I had gotten my first full time job after college and my goal was to be perfect. But actually, that was my goal. All my goals had been completed when I got that job. From graduating high school, to being a student athlete, to graduating college with an engineering degree. Check check check. I figured I’d develop new goals. I assumed, now that I had gotten to the end of my journey, I could focus on being perfect. Perfect job with perfect friends, perfect workout routine and perfect body. Perfect vacations. Perfect relationship. Perfect apartment.
So, in order to achieve this perfection, I would prepare and I would plan. I would begin preparations for the week coming up before I could even execute and get through the week that I was in. I would think about and analyze everything from the meals I would eat, to the clothes I would wear, to the times I would work out, to the times that I was going to take a shit. I remember planning for everything and then just going through the motions all week long.
It was fucking terrible.
I realized it was terrible, yet I still did it. And then I one day I thought that this is not the way I wanted to live my life. I don’t want to be eating five day old pasta from a Tupperware heated up sitting at my desk at the same time every day to then just drive somewhere at a certain time and put on the clothes that I had laid out five days ago to do an activity to come home and go to bed exactly at the time that I programmed that I wanted to just to wake up in the morning before the sun even a rose and do it all again. I’m a doer but I’m not a robot. I’m a human and I have human emotions and human feelings and human thoughts. And I want to be able to sit in the now and stand in the now and do in the now with my thoughts and let my thoughts take me on the path that I truly want to be taken on.
And then today I saw an article by Girlboss that described almost exactly this control and perfection that I have been experiencing for the past year. The article that Alison Ives writes says “There’s so much pressure for 20-somethings (especially women) to leave school and instantly become the power women we grew up idolizing. [After graduating] you have to get the job, stay fit, eat right, be funny, be smart. All these expectations make us forget to just be 20-somethings.”
So as a summary and a notice to myself, I say ~ Don’t bother trying to be perfect or in control. Life is neither. Don’t waste any time being anyone but yourself. That means figuring it out but having fun along the way. That means listening to what you want to do when you want to do it. Eat what you want because you want to not because you were given labels of healthy vs unhealthy or because of what you see people eating on Instagram. LIVE where you want to live. Sleep when you want to and or just stay awake. Explore your interests, passions, and hobbies. Don’t be afraid of failure or the perception by others of being less than perfect. Skip down the damn sidewalk if it makes you happy. Sing as loud as you can in your car with the windows rolled down. Love whoever. Cry. And keep your to do lists if you want. Or throw them away.
