Looking back over the last year and where I was when it started, it's been an amazing year. It's interesting that I can actually reflect back over everything, because I decided to document the experience here on the blockchain and I'm glad I stuck with it. I've tried to figure out what the biggest shift of focus was this year and it's obvious that deciding to focus more on myself and becoming the person that I wanted to be has fundamentally changed and shaped my life. So with that being said, I'm going to discuss what's different now and how I got here.
The first big change was that I stopped viewing myself as something separate from the rest of existence. I started viewing myself as part of this whole experience and stopped being "the one that everything was happening to" and became "part of it all." It may not seem like a big shift, but it is, and I feel like at the core of all of this is compassion. It's hard to have compassion for others when we don't have that for ourselves. Accepting my own strengths and weaknesses and focusing on how to do what I needed to take care of myself and be happy while still being of service to others allowed for a better understanding of compassion. It's not giving up anything for others, it's gaining everything for myself and others.
I had to face some hard facts at the beginning of the year. I wasn't happy, I was suicidal, and I was doing nothing to change that. The problems seemed to stem from victim mentality and feeling like the world owed me something because I tried to be what I viewed as a good person. It's funny how in retrospect I can see that it was all self righteous bullshit and entitlement, but I couldn't back then. I think all of our experiences are very subjective and unique and trying to determine who has it worse is all just a matter of perspective, but regardless of all of that, one thing is clear; It's possible to fix and change things about ourselves that we may view as "broken" at the time. It was clear I needed to face the next big change that I had to make.
The scariest and most significant change in my personal life was quitting my job. Quitting working a stable and reliable job with good salary, insurance, and a solid retirement plan was excruciatingly difficult. It was very hard to accept that what I was doing was insane and that the only person that could change it was me. Realizing that I was working a job I didn't want and being unhappy because I thought I needed the things it gave me was a bitter pill to swallow. I had to face the fact that if I was suicidal and at that low of a point in my life that I was ready to give up, then trying to convince myself that doing that for another thirty years was somehow a reasonable thing to do was simply irrational. So I did it, I quit and had to face the last hurdle that I spent most of the year doing.
I had to face myself. I had to learn how to be okay with who I am and how to be someone that I wanted to be around. It's pretty ridiculous to expect things or other people to fix something as self centered as not being okay with who I was when I was alone. That's expecting people and things or substances to distract me from myself. It turns out the more I focused on myself and doing things that I actually wanted to do, the more I liked myself and the less negative things I had to say to myself everyday. The people that are in my life are different now, but that's okay because I found a lot of like-minded individuals that encourage and challenge me to be better. I don't have to second guess myself or my decisions all the time anymore. I found faith in myself and humanity as a whole in the process. For the first time in my 31 years of life, I'm looking forward to a new year and seeing what it has in store for me. Namaste.