Anyone who has gone or is currently going through a period of personal growth knows the mix of feelings that go with it: excitement, confusion, anxiety, happiness, anger, and so on. I only just started this journey within the last 2 years, and that may sound like a long time, but it's been a time of serious reflection. I've been looking at my relationships across the spectrum; noticing toxic behaviors I've clung onto out of certain fears; and learning how to better understand money (since I used to spend it as soon as it appeared in my bank account). Combined with family drama, moving across the world, and having career setbacks—my personal growth journey has been a very weird process.
It's hard to heal in the same environment that made you sick, as someone somewhere said. I was worried about moving back home because that's where my panic attacks all began, and where a lot of my complexes were formed: "I'm too shy to make it in the world", "I'm invisible and no one cares about me", "I'm the poster child for 'big loser'", all that mentally-healthy stuff. But when I first arrived home after being in an awful job as an au pair in France, I was ecstatic to see my family again. The first month was heaven, and I found a new nanny job fairly quickly. But as time went on, and after I was rejected from every PhD program I applied to, I felt a sharp decline in my confidence and was unsure of what my future would look like.
Once I received all my carefully-worded emails about how my PhD applications were "unfortunately unsuccessful", I sat around with an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach almost daily. "What has all my schooling been for?" I asked myself, "Why did I make all these plans only for them to be completely trashed?" I started dating someone I shouldn't have out of the need for attention and belonging, due to feeling out of place in my own self. I sat around the house all day other than going to work, and felt no motivation for anything. Then after I stopped dating that someone, and had been doing online therapy for a couple weeks, I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself.
I started listening to motivational podcasts that taught me to keep pushing forward through failure, because it is the best teacher you can have. I listened to these almost daily, and kept telling myself mantras of self-acceptance and confidence. I listened to women who said they worked for several months to even years before seeing any results from their labor; and I felt the urge to create. I signed up for acting classes and have been taking them ever since.
Thoughts swirled around my head asking when I'd get that steady 9-5 job with benefits; when I'd move out on my own; when I'd have my own car; when I'd meet a nice guy; and so on. When, when, when, when, when. That's the word that kept hitting the front of my brain every 8 seconds. For us millennials, we want everything now, and if it doesn't happen now—we're doomed to be alone, broke, and stuck at home with our parents. And this simply isn't the case.
It took Lin-Manuel Miranda 7 years to write Hamilton. Seven. Goddamn. YEARS. Can you imagine the work it took to produce that kind of genius? An entire historical musical combining broadway and hip-hop? This is mainly why I love Hamilton: every time I listen to it, I think of Miranda in his home at a piano, notebook in hand, voice memo recording—jamming away while he writes and scribbles down every new note and lyric, then scrambling to write something different. He did this for SEVEN. YEARS. And now look at him. Look at how hard that work paid off.
Whenever you're feeling down about your progress, whenever you feel like your work isn't leading to anything, or that your labor is bringing nothing to the table—think of someone like Miranda to remind you of perseverance. Nothing is just handed to us if we want it to last.; we have to work for it, really work for it. So two years is nothing. I know the work I'm doing on myself, my blog, my YouTube channel, and my career pursuits will pay off. I know that what I want is here for me and that I need to have that belief firm in my mind to carry me through the tough times. We all do.
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