THE JOURNEY IS STILL MINE - LOH305
There have been moments in my life when I honestly felt little and unworthy.... And not because someone stood in front of me and told me I was useless.. Sometimes, the world doesn't have to say it directly. It shows you in other ways... It shows you when you look around and everyone seems to be moving faster than you, it shows you when someone younger is achieving something you have been trying to achieve for years, It shows you when your plans don't work out, It shows you when you are doing your best but the results are still taking their sweet time and sometimes, it shows you when you look at yourself and quietly ask, “Am I actually making progress?”...
I have asked myself that question more times than I would like to admit.. There is a strange stage of life where you are no longer where you started, but you are not yet where you want to be...
That is where I have found myself at different points in my journey... Not broke, but not completely stable... The awkward middle and honestly, that place can make you feel very small...
You start comparing yourself, You start questioning your decisions, You wonder if you should have chosen a different path, You begin looking at people around you and wondering why their lives seem to be moving while yours feels like it is loading on a very slow network but I have learned something about myself..... I may get discouraged, but I don't stay down for too long... Something inside me keeps saying, keep going.. Maybe it comes from knowing that my journey has never been a straight line..
There was a time when I thought I knew exactly what I wanted to become.
Then life happened.
My interests changed, My plans changed, Circumstances changed and eventually, I found myself building a career that looked very different from the picture I had in my head when I was younger...
Today, I have found myself in different spaces, doing things I never imagined would at all become part of my journey.
It hasn't always been easy and I definitely don't have everything figured out but maybe that is the point.... I don't need to have everything figured out before I move forward...
For a long time, I thought confidence meant knowing exactly where you were going, Now I think confidence can also mean continuing even when you don't know...
That lesson has followed me into other parts of my life too...
Every Saturday, when I go mountain hiking, there is something about that climb that reminds me of this...
You start at the bottom looking at the top and thinking, “Why did I decide to do this again?”
Then you climb.... Your legs become tired, Your breathing changes and there are moments when you want to stop but eventually, you learn to stop looking at the entire mountain... You focus on the next step, then another and before you know it, you are standing somewhere you thought was too far away when you started...
That has become a picture of life for me..
Sometimes the mountain isn't actually the problem... It is the way we look at it.. When you keep staring at how far you still have to go, you can convince yourself that you are not doing enough but when you look back at where you started, you realise you have actually come a long way...
I think the world has a funny way of making us measure ourselves with somebody else's ruler...
Someone seems to have life completely figured out, and you wonder what is wrong with you but we rarely know the full story behind somebody else's success..
We see the result, We don't see the years, We see the announcement, We don't see the failures, We see the smile, We don't see the nights they cried and that is why I am learning to stop measuring my journey against somebody else's timeline...
My journey is mine...
Some seasons will be faster, Some will be painfully slow, Some will feel like nothing is happening but something can still be happening beneath the surface...
Roots grow quietly before trees become visible and maybe people are like that too.
Sometimes you are growing in ways nobody can see yet...
I have also learned that being made to feel small does not always mean the other person is stronger than you...
Sometimes it simply means they have convinced you to look at yourself through their eyes..
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