“It was the end of a decade, but the start of an age”
As I write
this, I sit in my lounge room on what is the last Sunday of 2019 and the last
weekend of this decade. As the clock strikes midnight on Tuesday/ Wednesday, we
will find ourselves in 2020, the start of a bright new future. I am sure that,
as this moment comes, our social media feeds will be inundated with people
making resolutions, jokes about how stupid resolutions are and reflecting on the
year that was. I have, therefore, decided to do something a little bit
different and reflect on the decade that was.
When we saw in 2010, the first new year of this decade, I was 13 years old. I don’t
think I fully understood or really thought about the significance of the new decade
at the time and I certainly didn’t realise how lucky I was to have even made it
into it. Now, at 23 years old, I am much more introspective and this is largely
due to the things the last decade has taught me. Over the last ten years, I
have been through some horrible things and I have also had some of the best
experiences in my life. I have lost people, but I have also learnt the
importance of letting some people go. I have fallen in love and have had that
ripped away just a quickly – soon to realise that it was not all it is cracked
up to be. I have struggled with my mental health, but have learnt ways to deal
with it. I have felt like I am stuck
where I am, but have also managed to travel to 17 different countries. I
graduated high school, finished a Bachelor’s degree and have managed to get
over half way through a Master’s Degree. I know exactly what I want to do with
my life and finally see the value in the journey not just the destination. Most
importantly, I am able to look back on the life I have led over the last decade
and smile more than I cry, and I think that is such an important thing to be
able to do.
I wanted to
look back, retrospectively on the things that I have learnt this year as I truly
think these lessons are so important. They have shaped the person I am today
and will continue to shape the version of me that goes forward into the 20’s. So
here are the 11 most important lessons I have learnt since Midnight on January
1st 2010.
1.
Quality is quantity when it comes to
friends.
I know it
is clichéd, but over the last decade I have really started to understand what
they mean when they say it is better to have a small group of incredible people
around you than a large one of complete fakes. I have lost friends,
disconnecting from those who have made me feel lesser than I am. In a friendship,
it is so important that you accept each other the way you are, never doing
anything to make the other feel like they are not as good as you. Friendships
like this can only be best described as toxic. They drain the life
out of you, making you feel like you would rather stay home than hang out with
them. As I have gotten older I have learnt to take these feelings on face value
and to trust them. The best kind of friendships are the ones that no matter how
long you are together, you don’t get sick of it. The ones that don’t bring you
down and don’t make you feel bad about yourself, and these are the ones you
need to hold on to.
2.
Cleaning the world around you can
help clean your mind.
It is only
in the last year that I have really gotten my head around this. This time last
year, I traveled to Europe for three months. It was a condition from my family
that my bedroom had to be clean enough for them to go into while I was away, if
need be. So, I spent weeks cleaning out absolutely everything. In the end, I
had half a room full of absolute crap that was either going to be thrown out of
given to charity. This included anything from old toys, and textbooks I would
never open again to food wrappers and packaging off of things I didn’t even own
anymore. When everything was clean, when I had reorganised the entire room and
had thrown everything out, there was the strangest breath of fresh air in the
room. It felt like everything that had been weighing down on my shoulders was
lifted at last. Now that I am back to reality, no longer traveling, I have
maintained this clarity in my living space. I have found that when things start
to pile up in corners, when I don’t throw things away that I definitely have no
further purpose for, I feel myself sinking, emotionally and physically. It is
like the mess highlights the bad things in my life, it finds a way to drag out
all the worries and bring me down to its level. I went from being one of the
messiest people you will ever meet to
finally understanding the value of cleaning as I go, needing to make sure
everything is in order before I go to bed and again after every time I get
changed, shower, study or read in the space.
3.
The truest and realest friend a girl
can have in her life is their Mum.
As most 13
year olds, when the decade started I was looking for my independence.
Desperately trying to find ways to spend more time with my friends than my
family. As I have gotten older I couldn’t be more different. I now see the
value in having such an incredible Mother and would truly call her one of my
best friends. I don’t want to get too soppy because I know she is reading this
and I will never hear the end of it but… I love you Mum, you have done so much
for me and I will never take it for granted again.
4.
Loving yourself is more important
than loving someone else.
They say
you need to love yourself before anyone else will love you, I have talked about
this in a previous post but I want to reiterate how important this is. It is
commonly said that you have to treat others how you want to be treated, I say
the same should apply to loving yourself. Love yourself how you want to be
loved by others. If you are hating on yourself for the way you look, the way
you speak, or judging yourself for every little decision you have ever made,
how can you expect anyone else to love you differently? As young women, we grow
up thinking that all our problems will be solved when a man shows up to fix them,
but as we grow up, we learn they are not so heroic as we were led to believe and nor is it their job to be this way.
Don’t get me wrong, relationships can be emotionally very healing for some
people, but the only person you can rely on to fix the problems you have with
yourself is yourself.
5.
It is OK to be alone.
If all of
the above seems a bit hard, if you are struggling to accept yourself, if you
are struggling to open yourself up again or if you are just flat out not ready
to be in a relationship, it is so completely fine to be alone. In fact, it can
be one of the most healing things for your heart and soul.
6.
It is OK to struggle with mental
health. In fact, everyone does.
When this
decade started, I am not sure I really knew what mental health was, so I
certainly didn’t identify as someone who struggled with it. As I become older,
I developed an understanding of anxiety and depression and other such disorders
but I was still a little on board with the stigma that these kinds of things
only happen to certain people and that those people were few and far between.
Over the last few years, as I have come to terms with my own struggle with
anxiety and OCD specifically, I have really started to understand the extent of
this issue. I think, to some degree or another, every single person has
struggled with mental health issues. These
issues come up in conversation when discussed and should really be spoken about
more widely. But this is not something to crawl up in a ball and cry about. As long as you are getting help, talking to people or dealing with
things that way that works best for you, it is OK to not be OK.
7.
It is OK to be ambitious and to want
to learn.
In my first
three years of high school, two of which fell in the first half of this decade,
I couldn’t have been less interested in school. It’s funny for me to even think
about that when I look at the place I am at now. In those early days I was
merely a product of my environment, attending a school that valued sport more
than education where you weren’t pushed to do better and the bare minimum was
rewarded. I didn’t see the value of bothering to do any better than the B’s and
C’s I was getting. It sounds weird but it was actually Hermione Granger who
pulled me out of that headspace. One day over the summer holidays of year 8,
when watching Harry Potter for the 800th time, I made the decision
that I wanted to be more like her than the half-assed student I had been in the
years before. When I returned to school for the start of year 9, I made a conscious
decision to change my outlook, to be more focused and to do better and I did
just that. It took some time, but slowly by B’s and C’s turned to A’s and B’s –
and one D (no amount of magical wisdom was ever going to make me work harder in
PE). So, I continued on this path, getting a distinction in the National Geography Competition, becoming a straight A student and getting HD’s in all my
units at university. Over the years that followed, I decided that I liked
knowing things, I like the power of not having to search words to understand a
difficult conversation, I felt like I was in control of my own mind and it was surprisingly
freeing, now I endeavor to learn as much as I possibly can.
I am not saying all of this to brag, I am by no
means a naturally smart person, I will never be one of those people who can
take a test and ace it with no prior study, I have worked hard, putting in
endless hours to get where I am and I am proud of that. This early shift in my
mindset has shaped the person I am today, making me far more ambitious than I
imagine I would have been if I had continued on the same path. For so long
I thought it was uncool to be smart or to be interested in learning, I thought
it was a lame quality that wouldn’t get me anywhere in life, this is because I
valued others opinion of me more than I did my own abilities. I always had the
ability to do well, I just needed to trust in it for long enough
to bring it out and I am so glad I did. Sure, I was laughed at by small minded
people for choosing to study over playing sport, sure I have had moments that I
want to quit it all and go work at a fast food restaurant for the rest of my
life, but this decade, and some insight from Hermione Granger has shown me what
I am capable of, I will not go back to that headspace again.
8.
Sometimes you need a day or a week
of doing literally nothing and that is OK.
With all of
the above wisdom about working hard, I have to admit, sometimes it feels damn
good to sit down and do nothing. It doesn’t last long, but it is so important
when these moments come around, that you seize them. With all the chaos in our
lives, it feels like moments to relax become less and less frequent as we get
older and busier. It is so important to remember that sometimes you need to
just sit down for a day and do absolutely nothing. Whether it is catching up on
a television series, watching movies, going to the beach, hanging out with friends
or just sitting down and eating chocolate. It is so fine to just take a minute
to breath and unwind after a long period of doing the opposite. Don’t beat
yourself up over it, it is helping more than you realise.
9.
Exercise and maintaining a healthy diet
is so important to all other aspects of your life.
I think
that again has only really clicked over the last year or two. I always
understood that if you eat healthy and exercise you will lose weight/ be
physically more healthy. It is however, only recently that I connected this
with the other aspects of my life. If I eat healthy, it is easier to move
around, I have more energy and feel less bloated. If I exercise in the morning,
I feel energised as I move through the day and I sleep better at night. It is
also an incredible stress reliever to just run until you can’t anymore. It is
amazing how much two small and seemingly insignificant things can impact your
day and can contribute to your overall well-being.
10. Everyone dies, we cannot control this.
This is one
of the hardest things I have come to terms with over the last decade. I was
always aware of death but it is only recently that I have really started to
think about it more critically, realising the reality behind it. Everyone in
our lives, including ourselves are going to die some day and there is
absolutely nothing we can do to change that. This sounds like it is going down
a really sombre path but what this has taught me is to not take things for
granted. It is so important that we value the small moments while they last,
don’t leave things unsaid and that we always appreciate the time that we are
given. There is no point racking our brain about how we can change the inevitable,
it is a pointless exercise in misery that always brings us back to the same
place every single time. Just enjoy the wild ride that is life while it lasts.
11. It is the things we love that define our memory.
When you
lose someone, you find yourself thinking about them and the things that they
loved. When I think about my Pop, for example, who died a few years back, I
think about old time dancing, Jazz and Blues music and creamy desserts. These were his defining passions, the things that shaped his 80 years on this earth
and they are the things he has left behind for us to remember him by. I have spent
hours apologising for talking too much about the things I love in this life, but
I have learnt that those are the things that define who I am. It will be those memories that make my children in the future smile or cry
with tears of joy when thinking back on my life, I want them to be
un-apologetically the things that define my time on earth, that define the
memories I leave behind.
-
Overall the
10’s have been a wild ride, I have learnt some really hard lessons in some of
the hardest ways but I have also had the best few years of my life. As we move
into the new decade, remember to always be kind to yourself, don’t let the past
hold you down but instead let it shape your way forward. Set goals, but
remember that it is OK if you only get halfway there. Embrace the best people
in your life and remember that it is OK to let some of the negative ones go. It
may be the end of the decade, but it is really just the start of the rest of
your life, don’t let the landmark cause too much unnecessary stress.
Love Always
xx
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