I used to rush home from school just to get on my PlayStation and play with my friends. Our worries were limited to the competitiveness of Saturday soccer games and schoolteacher drama. Now I have drifted off chasing dreams while others chase their mortgage payments and drop their kids off at school. And that begs the cliché question, where did all the time go?

I am so baffled at how I randomly am so grown; I know the time didn’t dissolve quickly but looking back, it was slow when I was in it now it feels like a flash that went by. The shuffling feet of my peers walking to school turned into beeping cars and a phone ringing in an office as I sat there speaking to my older co-worker about a project I started 4 months ago. And it hit me like a baseball. I took that time for granted.

In the western world and in Sydney specifically, everything is a predecessor to the next thing. And you go through the day rushing the items and completing your tasks next thing you know the sun is setting and you’re staring down the barrel of the next day and its challenges. We order food on the way to home; we wake up in the morning and brush our teeth while the coffee machine makes our shot. We answer emails on the way to the office. We live autonomously, chasing things, but losing time, and ourselves in the process. At a certain point in time during the covid pandemic, I got so in my own head and isolated myself. My space became everything to me, I used to work for the sake of it and just rush home to be at my setup playing games with the boys or making videos.

They say live in the moment am I right? I think I was just coping at the time with major depression, from the looming dread of finishing university and the daily obsession with finding a full-time job relevant to my degree so I can kick-off my career. It affected my work, my energy levels, my mental health. Always chasing, chasing. Looking back, I don’t understand that version of myself. To be frank, I don’t even understand myself now truly, at all. I’m keeping it real I don’t have any answers for a lot of things. I have a gut, and intuition, I ask for advice sometimes. But is every decision I ever made the right one? Some very wrong decisions have been made on my part. But I think if I went back in time with no new knowledge, I would probably repeat the same mistakes. Even though I regret a lot, that is who I was then. That’s the beautiful thing about growth, you grow from experience, you have been that to be this. You look back and say “wow, that was something, why did I do that?”

Wisdom is just healed pain. Letting go of your old self is hard. Sometimes I wonder, did I live? Have I truly lived? Sometimes I look back and I’m embarrassed at the positions I put myself in, my reactions to things, and the people I did or didn’t associate with. But that’s the beauty of the human experience! You either gain or you learn. Obviously, it is deeper and more convoluted than that 50/50 but truly every loss and failure carries a lesson.

One day my kids or grandchildren may ask a random innocent question, and some memories I locked away might come flooding back. And then you’ll dish out a few nuggets of wisdom, it’ll satisfy their search for an answer but wouldn’t hold as much weight as your experiences. But only you’ll ever truly know it’s weight unless they go off on their life’s journey and experience something like yourself.

A big chunk of my early adulthood I spent at university and working full time. I experienced majority of that period alone with hobbies like training, and minimalist friend groups that chopped, changed, and dwindled over time due to life and due to my own mistakes. Part of the blame could be on my lack of experience at the time, or extreme sensitivity and social anxiety. What many people probably healthily had the luxury of experiencing in their teens I experienced a fast-tracked version of it condensed into my 20s. I never really opened up about my experiences to many, but those I trusted with it called me the infamous bio of this blog, a “Late Bloomer” and that always stuck with me.

Late bloomers are a testament to running your own race and not comparing yourself to others. Many individuals of the same age group are at different stages in our life, and as I healed and got older, for once I was okay with that. I was okay finishing university late, I was okay I hadn’t found “the one” yet, I was okay my career wasn’t taking off as fast as I had hoped. I detached from outcomes and focused on the now, I focused on where I was and who I wanted to be.

Earlier in the blog I discussed lockdown and my obsession with my space. I empathise with that version of myself a lot. While I loved my space and my freedom, I had yet to experience my co-dependency, people pleasing, and the dark tendencies of my personality. And that was a brutal lesson I later experienced as my life began to get complicated with relationships and older friends. I went above and beyond for others before I put myself first, and sadly I still do. In turn it affected me negatively creating power struggles in my relationships where I felt my needs were never met, I had conditioned myself to over give, and this led to a resentful attitude down the track. It’s been hard breaking out of that mentality, the mentality of never feeling good enough. It stems from low self-esteem, but going from that to setting boundaries in your life can be a tough transition. Not just for yourself, but for how others see you. I think that’s the grace of self-exploration and healthy refinement of oneself. It takes years, it is an uphill battle, and you are always experiencing and learning new things.

Everything is an addition to my life recently. I went through an extended period of contentment and self-love before life threw some more character development at me. But these days I can feel that self-love creeping back, and one day I will feel enough again.

All the Best.

H