self-help – Page 2

Why I decided to create a blog

Aloha!

I am pleasantly surprised I’ve come across my first follower for this new blog. Hello, new follower! And also I am grateful for the likes on my posts, it is like a constant reassurance from the Universe that we never go through life alone! I’m happy that you guy have enjoyed it, and hopefully found something inspiring in it.

The reason for this new post is just to clarify why exactly I decided to come here on WordPress. First of all, I have always loved writing. I discovered the more I did some serious introspection, the more I discovered that sometimes our true calling begins when we are children. And ever since I was a child, I have loved to read and write.

During the summers as a middle schooler, I would write short stories and poems and silly songs in those composition books we’d use for class. I’d practically fill up the whole notebook by the end of that two-month summer. I have an older sister who is 5 years older than me, with a birthday just one day short of mine and we have always been like yin and yang for each other.

We’d hang out in my room, and I’d create stories while we’d blabber about whatever children blabber about. I’d even make stories for her, read them to her, and act them out. It was such a fun, creative, and limitless time in my childhood and I will never forget it.

So yeah, here I am! Still writing. And I am so happy I came back to it, no matter how hard and confusing my life got.

I’m happy to say that I finally secured a job and am just waiting for a call back to get rehired.

It’s an old job and you might know it!

I will be back to brewing coffee, blending Frappuccinos, and even pursuing my dream!

So… where do we go from here?

Where do we go when everything seems shit out of luck? Maybe we don’t have to “go” anywhere. Maybe we just have to accept everything as it is now. So we don’t have a job or a college degree or something reputable to hold up our self-image. Oh well. What kind of progress would we make if we cared so much about what other people think? At the end of the day, we all have to deal with ourselves, no one else. We’re allowed to feel sorry for ourselves, sure. But we can’t wallow in it forever. One day, one moment we have to wake up and make a decision. Suppose we get real quiet and focused within, we’ve analyzed everything that has occurred in the past that led up to this very moment…

“What shall I do now?”

After the crying, the contemplation, the restless nights, the anger…

We ask ourselves, what now?

Maybe the next course of action is very simple. So simple yet there’s still some resistance.

“After everything I’ve been through, am I worthy of going on? How could I ever muster up the courage? All the struggle, not feeling good enough, not feeling heard or understood, the criticism… How could I?”

Go further into the self-pity and suddenly it turns into: “What’s the point?”

So maybe we procrastinate a little just to see how far it could go. We’re allowed to have fun. So we watch television, numb ourselves to music, make unnecessary purchases. Practically anything but confront the elephant in the room. But then that nagging feeling pops up again. We can’t ignore it. Something within us is asking, begging for us to look at it.

Perhaps we haven’t uncovered everything yet. Perhaps we have to look again into what’s keeping us stuck. If we’re still looking at the past with feelings of pain and struggle, maybe we’re still missing the point. Typical logic would assume that we’d pick up the lesson by now and move on. But it takes time to learn a lesson, and to truly learn a lesson we have got to learn it correctly.

So be patient with yourself. Especially when everything seems like a dead end. There’s a gift in each day, each moment if we just look carefully. We may not be in the place we want to be, but we’re here anyway. Might as well deal with it.

Life Update and Life Lesson(s)?

June 13, 2022 / 9:50 pm

A lot of changes have happened over the past month. Starting on May 27, just last month to be exact. Oh yes, on that fateful May 27th day, I was fired. I was happily fired from my job as a bakery wrapper. I was confused, angry and understandably upset. It was my first time being fired from anything. Sure, I’ve seen people getting fired but never me. I thought I’d always been adequate enough. And hey, I still think I’m adequate enough. But sometimes getting fired means we’re opening doors to something greater than ourselves and our adequate-ness. The more I opened up to that, I discovered that things always work themselves out. It always does. It just takes a lot of faith, solid faith, to see that.

And more so, I discovered that my inner self that so wanted to come out just couldn’t in the environment I was in. My true self felt stifled and hid away in return for straight physical labor. Coming in everyday, feeling like a workhorse just couldn’t sustain me for very long. I just couldn’t handle all the work that was demanded of me. Also to mention we were understaffed (is every company understaffed??) While I’d try to be calm and collected, trying my best to get work done, my manager would push me to work even faster.

“Did you time yourself?” or “How long did it take you to get that done?” or “Let me show you our time table to assess how fast you should really go” or something always concerning the speed of my work.

Not only that, but the fact that I was calm and collected seemed to strike a chord with my manager. Some days I’d be careless, like wearing pretty nail polish but being clever enough to always put on my latex gloves before touching anything. And then there was the fateful day, the day my supervisor discovered my shoes. Handling two jobs led to inconsistency. The two months I was there, I wore my Nike shoes, thinking it’d be good enough. But I never considered how serious the non-slip rule was, especially since I typically was rarely around places I could slip. So I was scolded and had to wear tall big boots. Ones that the meat and deli department wore. Rain-looking boots. They were heavy, and although they were “non-slip” I actually found them to be quite slippery for some reason.

Now I was really pushing the line. Now with my body practically all-around fatigued from the physical labor, I sensed something within. A feeling like I wouldn’t be at the job much longer. In fact, I’d always sensed that on some level. Just didn’t know it’d come so soon! Practically a few days before a co-worker asked to hang out with me and I choked up. Guess that wouldn’t amount to anything either.

So on May 27, 2022, I was fired. And I was glad but also knew I had to collect myself to figure out why it happened the way it did. It was time to begin some introspection. I knew I had tried my best at that job, although careless at times, and sometimes understandably so. So was it right to guilt trip myself about it? No. I wouldn’t allow myself to dig a hole of guilt after everything. Was it a simple mistake? Yes. And with mistakes come corrections. So I had some corrections to get through.

I realized that no matter how busy the outside world seemed, if I wasn’t calm, I couldn’t get anything done clearly. Sure, I could get things done, but my performance was messy, disorganized, and erratic. Then I began to notice when things were done like that, mistakes usually would follow.

So I had to learn the importance of being calm and with it, seeing where this open door would lead me.

The great thing about being fired is that now I have a blank slate once again. I have time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t. I also get to ask myself that very important question: What is it that I truly want?

When I decided to work for that company, my main intention was to just get the bills paid. I had some debt piled up after an unexpected death in the family and needed money. So there I went, thinking it’d be good enough to get me through.

But money isn’t what I truly want. What I truly wanted and still choose today is to do something meaningful with my life. The only meaning that job had to me was that it gave me financial stability at a time when I didn’t have much. And most of us know by now money can’t buy us happiness. Maybe a comfortable life externally, sure. But if we’re not feeling all too great within, how can we ever enjoy life and all it’s beauty?

And say if we did get a great lump sum of money, what would we do with such a responsibility anyways? From what I’ve heard and seen, sometimes a lot of money just ends up becoming another burden. But hey, maybe there can be balance found in that too…

What I am really trying to point out here is that maybe finding that something meaningful is actually really simple. And it took this whole blog post of several paragraphs to reveal that, but sometimes that’s how true understanding works. We have to be willing to dig deep sometimes. Figure out what it is we’re actually accomplishing in our lives.

Some people are blessed to have figured out what that is and have rightfully pursued their something-meaningful. Maybe they’ve become successful authors, or doctors devoted to helping their patients and humanity, or maybe they just have a small business and make shave ice and sweet desserts 8 hours a day.

Pursuing something meaningful doesn’t mean we have to do something show-worthy or drastic, sometimes it just means taking the time for ourselves. Being kind to ourselves, and seeing how that could help others too.