when becoming someone you've never been before

| personal experiences & epiphanies about feeling lost in the noise

Have you ever felt as if out of nowhere the world is blurring and all the surrounding noise gets muffled away and all you can think about is how behind you are in life? Even if, technically, you aren’t, but in that moment everything just comes thrashing down on you, be it the skills you haven’t learnt yet, the goals you’ve pushed back on, the gym-workouts you skipped, your messed up sleep schedule, the 218938 concepts taught in your class, the friends you never made, the touch-starved soul that wants to be loved without any prejudices, sigh it’s never ending.

I felt this today while sitting in my financial econ class and it suddenly struck me, that maybe I should be doing more, studying more, working out more, going out more, reading more, learning more, creating more, just more & more & more. The centre point of it all being that I should be focusing on myself more, and not just by managing my time better, but also, by cutting down on things that perhaps take more value out of my life than they add, for example, Instagram, the doom scrolling just never ends, I honestly love talking to my friends, sharing 3872827 reels with each other on a daily basis, but truly at some point the minutes turn to hours and suddenly its 1am and you only have 5.5hrs of sleep-time before you gotta wake up and get ready for college.

Weirdly, I love Tiktok more than Instagram, as tiktok really just shows me the music edits, the studytok motivational vids, the funny shit, the things that I actually like and am more interested in watching. Instagram reels on the other hand just don’t have that same sense of “knowing” about my interests or preferences, yk what i mean? 😭

However , recently I had this epiphany, that, despite not being at my highest potential yet, I still deserve to recognise my efforts to become better. We often wish to have a lover who would love us despite our flaws, someone who would love us through our greasy hair-days, our bloated days, our acne breakout days, our low-energy days, our clingy days and what not. If we expect this bare minimum from our partners then why not from ourselves? Maybe it’s in the act of loving yourself like a lover would, that gets you closer to attracting true love into your life.

Perhaps, we just need to be kinder to ourselves and not let the fear of being left behind hinder us from becoming what we are meant to be. A lot of the times starting is the biggest hurdle, for which I have already found the solution and you can read it here. Whenever you start to feel the noise creeping up, just remember that yes even though your workload and stress levels are just skyrocketing right now, life is also giving you a way to upgrade your strength, your ability to handle tough situations, your mindset, your skills.

It’s important to give yourself that grace & allow yourself to make mistakes, when you’re trying to become someone, you’ve never been before. It’s okay to not wake up at 6am right away when trying to wake up early, it’s okay to have emotional breakdowns over that script you wrote for the youtube video, it’s okay to not have the energy for the leg day & instead just going for a walk. One thing I always remind myself when things get hard is,“Don’t complain about a full plate when the goal was to eat!”

Maybe it’s because of the final year college shenanigans that make me feel a bit overwhelmed with life but, like at the end I chose this, I chose to study for this degree, I chose to hit the gym for my fitness goals, I chose to express myself and my creativity via making content on IG and Youtube & by writing articles here on substack, I chose it all, then why should I compare myself with others or complain about the path that I CHOSE WILLINGLY. So, I’ve been reminding myself of my “Why”, my bigger purpose for doing these things, and I will continue to do so, despite the challenges of being a human, someone who wants to do everything and be everyone at once.

Sylvia Plath certainly ate & left no crumbs with the Fig-tree analogy but maybe that’s the fun of being a dreamer, the trial & errors of becoming someone, everyone, you wanna be, and one day you find yourself embodying limitless experiences & eventually live to tell the tale of your life.

I hope this piece made some sense as I kinda just went on with my train of thought and hit no stops lmao. Been obsessed with this song ‘12 to 12’ by Sombr recently. Also, happy belated friendship day to yall, tysm for reading loves.

I am so so grateful for each one of you, pls never stop dreaming and keep loving yourselves. Thank you so much for being here <3

xoxo

Shreya