Potential

This past month has been pleasantly hectic. After struggling for nearly six months to keep myself occupied, my efforts have finally become fruitful. While I would like to blame someone else for my boredom this year, I think I am the main culprit. I simply focused too much on reaching goals I thought I should achieve, rather than balancing these aims with things I wanted to do. Now that I am starting to even out my focus, I am finding more enjoyment in my life.

My concentration on doing things I should do instead of those that I want to do began ages ago. While in high school, I spent my time studying and choosing to partake in activities that would improve my likelihood of getting into college. Though not all of these activities were boring or of little interest to me, many were and I found little enjoyment in them. In college, I followed suit as I tried to prepare my resume for the working world and took jobs that led me to a "good" job. Though these decisions were all good in the sense that getting a college degree and a satisfying job greatly improve one's level of security, they kept me from viewing life as an opportunity for enjoyment and not just work. It is not that I did not know how to enjoy my life, it was that I ignored these desires in favor of what I thought success meant.

This pattern of ignoring my desires became second-nature to me and soon it became hard to even recognize what I wanted out of life. When I looked toward my future, all I saw was item and after boring item on a never-ending list of to-do's. No wonder I was depressed. Now that I am finally realizing that this is a major reason for my unhappiness over the years, I am trying to re-establish a relationship with myself so that I can create a life that is a healthy balance of wants and should's. This is how I got myself to take ice-skating lessons for the first time as a 24-year-old. I am also reigniting my passion for travel, art, and dancing. The list of things I hope to do and try is getting longer by the day and, for the first time, completing this list of to-do's is gratifying.

It isn't easy to change my way of thinking and sometimes, when I feel anxious because I can't discern what I want to do from what I think I should do, I revert to my list of should's. One thing I am realizing is that doing nothing is what scares me, so when I feel worried because I don't know what to do, in favor of doing nothing and being unproductive, I grasp at anything I can think of to fill my time and this is usually something I "should" do because this way of thinking is still so natural to me. I am trying to remind myself that when I feel scared or uncomfortable, this is not cause for alarm, but is rather a signal that I need to be thinking about what I want and what is best for me at that moment. I need to stop looking at my anxiousness as a state of limbo and begin seeing it as a state of potential in which I can do many things and, if I let myself think for awhile, I will find what it is I am looking for. So, here's to introspection!