The Absolute Feeling Of Losing All That You Have Built
I embarked on a transformation journey, became successful and lost all of it. Here’s the story.
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Twelve years ago, I was 10 years old. Standing in front of my teachers for the on-the-spot speech competition, in a language I could barely speak, I cried for not being able to frame grammatically correct sentences with the few words I knew. I cried for not being able to convey what I was thinking.
Had my teacher not motivated me and appreciated me for what I had done so far, I wouldn’t have given it another try. Yes, she gave me another opportunity the same day. It didn’t make much difference. I stammered and gave the speech in just five sentences. I was contentful on the second try and my teacher was happy to see me do it.
But at that moment, I’d decided. I won’t give it another try as long as I ain’t prepared for it. And definitely, I was going to do it again!
What I learned before I began
That it was not going to be just about learning to speak fluently in a language. Learning a language takes time and as long as I don’t become not only fluent but also thorough in the subject I was going to talk about, I would never be confident enough to do it. Or even if I do it without the subject knowledge, I will only end up looking stupid.
I also figured out that I needed to improve my understanding of myself, feel self-confident in the spotlight, and be able to impress people of different kinds without having to look like I was staging a drama.
This is simple.
I should look raw. Confident. Yet, I should be listened to by people. I shouldn't look like I was faking myself; the confidence shouldn’t be a temporary stage dress I choose to wear when I am in front of the audience, it should be an attire I live with.
That was the basic idea I had about winning the competition. I never knew it was going to take me till the moment of getting coronated as the School Leader in the last couple of years of my school.
Here’s what happened afterwards
I went through a journey of transformation, which I didn’t realize until I came out of it. I had trained my voice, my gestures, my attitude, and even my way of perceiving the world to focus in the right direction. I ruled out everything and everyone that didn’t contribute to the idea of who I was to myself and what I wanted to become.
Until one day…
I lost all of it.
Yes, you read it right. The first eighteen years of my life were productive and beautiful. I had the same resources, if not less, back then as compared to what I have now. But now, I’m 22, and I feel stuck. I feel the inconsistency in my habits, routine, sleep, academics, hobbies, and even my perspectives about the world building up day by day.
I feel anxious most of the time. I plan a lot but I don’t do most of it. I lost connections with most of my school-time friends except a couple of them. But I am grateful that I have a few good people to count on, including my friends and acquaintances in college.
Not all of what I have built over the years has faded. But most of it has changed now. I am a different person now, in terms of what I believe in and what I have accepted in life.
Insights
I used to be compassionate to people who even envied me. Even to people who talked behind my back. I knew what they did, and I smiled at them knowing their attitude towards my ideas wouldn’t affect who I was.
I always chose not to speak bad about people. In other words, gossip less. But these days, I find myself complaining more. Not even about myself. But about the fact that some people are luckier than me. Sometimes, I pondered and found excuses as to why I was not able to work like other people around me.
I assumed myself always as the victim of problems and therefore, as someone with ample excuses to not do my work which at times, narrowed down to waking up on time to get ready for college.
For me, if I was not able to finish my assignments or my record work, I was not to be blamed because I had excuses. In my head, it was never my mistake. Because I never entertained myself like the way they did. I never went to movie theatres to watch movies or scrolled on Instagram to waste time as everyone did. I was not into any web series or TV serials. I was not dancing to DJ parties like I did in my first year of college. I never went with my friends to hang out in the town or go shopping unless I urgently needed to buy some clothes, spend time at some random beautiful cafe, or eat all the fancy junk food out there in the town.
And when everyone was taking rest/sleeping, I was striving to fix myself. I was working, either for some content team or I was doing a poster for the upcoming event in the college, or studying my college-level engineering subjects in depth and detail.
Maybe, to people I met in college after I turned nineteen, I am just another girl with flaws, complaining about the people around me, finding excuses to not do my work, giving lazy excuses for keeping pending work, and using PMS as a way to escape from situations of the crisis of our team.
But deep inside, I carry the heaviness of not becoming who I wanted to be despite the efforts I have put into becoming the dream girl I am. I still hold strongly onto the sense of purpose that set me out on this journey; the only difference is that I am 22 now and I was 10 back then.
Life is tough back then.
Life is tough even now.
I will continue to strive to become better and get back on track. To try different ways and end up landing on that one perfect way to put things back to place without feeling discontent about my choices and decisions in life.
Thank you for reading.
Regards,
Bhavya Raj
