I know the new year has already started and I’m little late in the game, but I’d like to share my note about 2018. It’s not really a year review, it’s more of note to myself, because 2018 was pretty amazing year and I wanted to make sure I will remember this year.
Like a lot of people, I used to think that I was strong and smart enough to figure out my life. But struggles are seriously real when you get older and I wasn’t handling them right. I pretend I was ok, tried to be positive when my heart was broken, and smiled because I thought that was what people wanted to see. As much as I was presenting myself as a strong person, I was crushed inside. Last couple of years, I wasn’t happy (surprise!).
In 2018, it finally got better. I mean it got worse and I finally took actions. I made it better. Here is the list of actions I took and turned around my life in the year of 2018:
- Accepting myself: I wasn’t ok. I needed help. I know I’m not perfect and I don’t have to push myself if it’s not “me”. I was always hard on myself and it was such a relief to accept the fact I wasn’t ok.
- Practicing mindfulness: There are so much about mindfulness that changed me. I’m still learning a lot about it, but I’d like to share few things mindfulness taught me. It helped me to understand myself, to take moments to appreciate things in my life, and to not to judge. It also helped me accept myself more as I started to understand myself.
- Focusing on my goals: Things happen in life and sometimes it’s not easy to achieve the goals you have. It doesn’t mean you have to keep pushing yourself. So I accepted myself for not being able to achieve my goals for this year, but instead, made new goals to focus. I was still pushing myself in a way, but in the better way I could adopt myself in the situation.
- Being in a community: This is not something I started this year, but one of the reasons why I could keep myself going was because I have amazing friends who have been supporting me to achieve my goals. Those amazing friends in the community are inspiring others everyday. By spending time with them, you want to get out of bed and go running. I couldn’t let myself being depressed.
- Appreciating people around me: I’m thankful to have those friends, family, and colleagues in my life, and I have been trying to show appreciation. (Sorry if I still don’t do it enough!) By showing my appreciation, they show their appreciation back to me and it gave me the confident I needed. They reminded me I was doing well, and it felt really good :)
- Appreciating my body: I have been running a lot and I literally say thank you to my body when I stretch/massage them. A lot of achievement this year was physical activities and I never appreciated my body as much before! Also, this made me love my body more. Growing up, I was never comfortable with my body, but thru those experiences this year, I can finally say I love my body!
2019 will be another fun journey to learn and challenge myself to become the person I want to become. 2018 was amazing, because I could build the strong foundation for next steps.
So hello 2019! Can’t wait to spend quality of time with you!
