After All

Recently, I sat and reflected on my life in my journal. When the world went into lockdown this time three years ago, I remember vehemently rejecting the idea of the ‘new normal’. This impossibly unpredictable situation would blow over and we’d go back to our lives within a few weeks – I can even remember my friends and I scoffing that ‘WFH’ had appeared in my Outlook calendar for NINE weeks, which sounded unbelievably long.

The truth was, I was uncomfortably content in idly letting my mundane life zip by. Get up, work, meet a friend for an often rushed dinner, catch a long train home, repeat. Chaos, but idly so.

I just didn’t know it – yet.

When I reflect on what life looked like in 2019, I can simply say it looked like a blur of obligations, people-pleasing, autopilot and bending my own boundaries for others. The best thing that could have happened for me was change and upheaval. And change and upheaval, I got. I began to disassociate from my job, finding it meaningless and frivolous while so much was happening in the world, my long-term relationship crumbled further, and all of the time spent with my own thoughts lead me to realise I wanted things to be different.

After all, we’re the masterminds of our own lives.

By November 2020, I felt seriously disoriented and had set into motion a path to take apart and rebuild my life on my terms. For so long I’d been going with the tide, letting myself be taken advantage because of several causal effects and I wanted change. I broke up with my then-boyfriend, went part-time at my day job before eventually leaving altogether, and established new routines – physically and mentally – to coax the new, or real, me out.

It turns out that nothing is simply as easy as ‘rebuilding life on your own terms’. The following months were tumultuous, even when my friends were holding me. After all, everything as I knew it needed work and I didn’t know where to start. Between a breakup, leaving my job and navigating a post-lockdown life all on my terms, I needed a little extra help via the means of therapy.

I sat and reflected in my journal mid-December, like I always do, about the last 12 months, and realised that it has been another year full of growth. From a friendship break-up that I once thought I’d never recover from to feeling lost towards my career, I ended up seeing 2022 out with a full and grateful heart and the job of my dreams. When you take a step back and peer at the bigger picture, you realise that change has always enveloped you. You’re always evolving.

After all that happened, curious change always has your back and you can always choose life on your terms.

After all, we’re the masterminds of our own lives.