Hey, guys – welcome back to TNTH!
How’s everybody doing? Everyone came into the new year feeling refreshed? If not, I hope the feeling of starting anew happens very soon for you, because everyone deserves to reset at the beginning of the year.
I wanted to begin the year with one of my favorite series on the blog:
This month’s topic of A Voiceless Rant has to be one of the most underrated and overlooked things in our lives: patience. Patience is one of those things that people easily dismiss, especially if you live in a city like NYC. Being a New Yorker puts this lack of patience in you because this is the city that never sleeps. We are constantly on the go and in order to survive somewhere like NYC, you have to be quick with everything. With that being said, we tend to always miss the small things in life. Those small things could even potentially be game changers in one’s life; who knows? But being a young adult in NYC makes us prone to always move forward to get what we want and what we need I order to survive and be successful. For many of us, slowing down isn’t an option, sometimes slowing down is something one never does in their lifetime. I, for one, am learning about the value of time, yet the importance of patience and how those two connect into a positive, healthy lifestyle. I swear I’m not going crazy.
One thing I failed to realize and do for the majority of 2017 was to let life do its thing. I constantly had to have control over many situations and if they didn’t turn out the way I had planned it, it would stress me out completely. I’ve always been the type of person that needed to have everything under my control or else I felt like I was losing control, and this past year I lost a lot of my control because I didn’t have any patience to balance myself out. I was constantly working yet I felt like I wasn’t doing enough, I was constantly trying to change my look to bring myself back to my life yet I felt like everything I was doing was simply a cover-up and fake version of myself, I constantly tried to make things better, yet I always felt I was making things worse, and in retrospect, I did make things worse. I learned that bad things don’t go away after being happy for one day. Just because my stressful Fall semester of grad school is over, doesn’t mean I’m not going to fall in the same hole I was in during my Spring semester (which I probably would). In order to see progress and change, you have to have patience.
I am patiently waiting for my hair to grow back healthy and long after messing with it for 8 months straight in 2017. I am patiently waiting for new, positive hobbies to turn into habits so that I have a more organized and constructive lifestyle. I am patiently waiting for the doctor’s appointment I’ll have next to tell my primary doctor that I would like to seek therapy to prevent myself to fall down the rabbit hole of depression I was living in for most of 2017. I am patiently waiting for good things in the future because I know I still have obstacles to face in the present. I am patiently taking things one step at a time (i.e. my social and school anxiety, my mental/physical health, etc.) so that in the long run, things like this are conquered and resolved and don’t play such a heavy and negative role in my life. This year, I am practicing patience, because I feel like it’s the thing in my life that I never allowed in it.
I advise everyone to practice it. Stop and smell the roses.
-Liz. (:
Letters From Liz. 