Picture this: It’s the end of a long workweek. You take off your work clothes and hop into something more cozy for the night after taking a hot shower. You look at your phone– at this point, it’s just habit– and see your social media followers post how their night is going on their IG stories. Some are at a small concert somewhere in the city. Some are posting boomerangs of the cute drinks they bought at a bar. Some are just hanging out with their friends, celebrating the end of the week and the beginning of the weekend. You don’t feel like you’re missing out on all the fun and cool things happening in the world, and you don’t feel the need to force anything you’re really not up for doing. You feel content. You feel okay. You feel… well, at peace.
What? Since when?
Well, I guess this is what it feels like. What chapter are we on now? Oh! Right. Chapter eight: peace.
Chapter Eight: Peace
It was a particularly cold and rainy April day, yet I felt like I needed to leave the house before I drowned in my thoughts. My eyes were puffy, and my head hurt; nothing I deemed as a coping skill was working. I have to go for a walk before I lose my mind. I walked for about 2 miles before deciding to sit in a Dunkin Donuts; of course, I bought myself a hot coffee and decided to write a blog post to distract myself. It didn’t work.
It wasn’t until I decided to walk home and listen to WOODZ’s new album that everything hit me at once. Why was I allowing other people’s actions to control my mental health? Why was I solely blaming myself for the failed friendships, making myself feel like I deserved all of the bad things happening to me, and telling myself that I was nothing but a bad person.
I was tired of feeling the way that I did, and I was tired of history repeating itself in stages of my life where I knew better. This time, I wanted to get over this funk differently. Instead of allowing myself to feel like a victim in everything happening, I wanted to change how I viewed my role in these situations and learn from it. It took some ups and downs to finally realize that I needed to change my mentality in order to live a peaceful life. I was simply tired of allowing myself to get sucked into feeling all these negative things and running from them when it got too hard.
By the summertime, I had set boundaries with the toxic traits embedded in me; traits that I knew were just a part of my psyche and too convoluted to understand and work through. I needed to accept the fact that I was not this perfect person with perfect character traits. I had to accept that some of my toxic traits played numerous roles in the clashing of both past and current relationships and friendships. The same way I would set boundaries with the toxic people in my life, I needed to do the same thing with my own toxic self.
I started eliminating the things that caused me to revert to my toxic traits. I started to restrict my time on social media platforms, filtering the context that made me feel anxious or impulsive (i.e blocking people I had falling outs with, muting stories and posts that were negative, etc). I stopped caring about what other people thought about me by doing things that made me feel good, and I (finally) stopped feeling guilty for doing things I wanted to do and doing them at my own pace.
I went to my second-ever Kpop concert. I went to a taping of The Kelly Clarkson Show. I went to a Halloween party. A Halloween party? Me? I know! Once I started to do things for myself without doubting whether or not I would be okay, I found myself being a very active and busy person. I wanted to do nothing but spend every night after work doing something fun just to celebrate the hard work I did that day. I wanted to go to every concert of every singer and band that I liked, even if I needed to travel to big venues and busy parts of New York City to attend them. I simply wanted to do things that nurtured my younger self, the one that spent decades second guessing everything their worth and their ability to do anything they wanted to do. It was about time I did things solely for the purpose of making the little me the happiest she could possibly be.
A time when things were simple. A time when I always felt at peace, before life got too complicated.
Perhaps this new era of my life is just about me closing a chapter of my life before 2024 comes and I turn 30. Maybe all of this soul-searching and practices to become a better person to myself is me wanting to end my 20s on a good note. I entered my 20s in a good place, and the years in between definitely were not the greatest, nor the easiest for me. I’ve been told for the longest time by women older than me that the 30s are your best years because something just clicks in your head. A lot of the things that were important to you, like vanity and people-pleasing and having huge friend groups, aren’t that important to you anymore. You develop your own style outside of what’s trending, you don’t say yes to everything if you truly feel uncomfortable doing them, and you start to realize and appreciate the things that you have versus wishing on the things that you want. I guess it finally clicked with me, and perhaps having a peaceful life simply comes with age and maturing. Maybe I’m finally maturing.
Whatever this era symbolizes or means in the long run, I just know that when I sit down, take a deep breath, and begin to reflect on this last year, I smile and simply say, “Finally”.
Letters From Liz. 