I welcome you to my blog and another wonderful edition of the Hive Learners' featured post. The truth is that I thought that before now I would have my life figured out already, know what I want to do, where I want to settle, and have a stable paying job. As a child growing up, the dreams I had planned out for myself are completely different from what is playing out in my life right now. By now I thought I would have attained the level of success that I dream of, but the reverse is the case, and I am miles away from the life I dream of, and it is even more painful because one keeps chasing the life they want, but sometimes it just feels like that life is not within reach.
Life itself already has its own pressures; it is not a smooth sail and can never be a smooth sail, and then we tend to add our own problems because of our expectations that are not met, and somehow the pressure increases, and we are left with nothing but sadness and emptiness. Sometimes when I look around me, I feel like I am putting so much pressure on myself because the level I am currently at is not the level I am supposed to be at and also not the level many of the friends I grew up with are at. I know that there are those better than me and those I am better than, but the truth is that I look ahead and only want to be better.
I badly want to be successful and have the type of impact that I dream of and imagine before a certain age, but the country I found myself in is a system that does not support dreams, and to make a dream happen, you have to work yourself out; outworking a failed system like that of my country is a very difficult thing to do. I have friends abroad who have a system that favors them, and how good they are doing for themselves is something that leaves me thinking Binak is not doing good enough for herself, and also, I forget that the system we are working under is too distinct for us to have the same success rate.
One of the ways that I put so much pressure on myself is comparing myself with peers or friends who have gone way ahead of me. I tend to forget that we can be peers or age mates, but that does not mean we will have the same pace; some will be faster, some will be fast, and some will be slow, but sometimes I just ignore all of this, and I find myself under a lot of pressure because I only look at the factor that we are peers or age mates, but then there are so many things that are at play before one is successful, and it's not all about the age.
How I react when things don't go as planned totally depends on how much I expected that thing to work out. Everything in life is risk, but we all know that there are those risks that, when taken, we are at least 90% sure will work out. When things like this don't work out, it breaks me even more, and then there are those risks that, from the beginning, we knew had a slim chance of working out. When they don't work out, they don't hurt that much; you just know that in life not everything will go as planned, but you just have to control how much you let it affect you.
