It is time for the annual reflection piece. In contrast to last year’s very rushed version, I endeavour to write something more... substantial this year. Or at least try to. The inspiration is personal growth. I started drafting this on the birthday of one of my favourite persons in this planet. I have a deep admiration for this person and I am humbled to have my path colliding with hers for the past few years. She is one of those rare humans who gets better with age. And I don’t say this because she remains youthful despite dying her hair purple the other week; it is a vibe. She’s got good vibes.
I have been an adult for a bit now and I must say I am still figuring out what this whole adulting is really about. Some days I do good, other days, well, questionable at best. Adulting is like this … skill, and it’s a very important skill, yet we were never taught this. It’s like school kinda forgets to. There was the rush to grow up. There was the rush to alleged freedom of being able to live independently and have ice cream for breakfast. But with these, comes a responsibility to adult; they forgot to tell us.
The irony of life is that we spend our childhoods wishing we would grow up sooner, faster, only to realise that uh oh, looks like we’ve been conned. It is not as easy as it looks. I feel like this realisation hits harder for those who breezed through school. There are fourteen years of schooling that each of us have been subjected to before we hit eighteen. And these years are great for external validation. Conspiracy theories aside, the end-product of schooling is compliant citizens. We grew up doing what our schools deemed acceptable. There was hardly any room for individualities - their acknowledgement, let alone celebration. With this mindset, as adults, we continue to seek external validation. We finished school, so we get a job. We focus on career progression because it’s the responsible thing to do. We move out at a certain age, start saving for the down payment of a property and travel – because who doesn’t.
If that works out for you, that’s great. As that means, you excel at the things that people project onto you. If they say you gotta go in this direction, then you’ll go. Replace ‘they’ with ‘your parents’ and you get the idea. Most of us soon realise that there is this … tension between doing what feels most suitable for us and what is acceptable by… society. This is perhaps an inaccurate description at best, the tension is more like a tug of war for some of us. The need to stand our ground is often more significant than our need to be accepted for what we are. Which probably explains why I have a special kind of respect for those who manage to stand their ground and subsequently get acceptance for who and what they are. Not an easy feat. A remarkable achievement. Bonus point if they remain soft in the process.
So how to excel at adulting?
We must work on ourselves. The goal is to have confidence, defined as feeling safe in connecting with yourself and with others at a given point in time. To achieve this, we first must know ourselves. It sounds simple, and the sooner we master this, the better our lives would be. To know ourselves, we need to look deep down into our cores, and that is not easy. There’s no way around it. There’s no shortcut. There’s no instant gratification that doesn’t bring painful long-term consequences. It is all hard work. It is in fact one of the hardest things that we will get to experience in this life, if we get to experience it at all. If there’s one thing in this life that we gotta work our asses off on, this would be it.
This is only palatable when we are driven by passion; we must work from a place of love. If you are not passionate about what you are and who you are, then it is incredibly difficult for you to remain curious about what makes you, you. If you don’t feel passion for yourself, then the task of getting to know yourself would seem arduous, pointless, meaningless. This is unhealthy. There, I said it. If you don’t love yourself, it would be difficult for you to love others and accept love from others. And without love, life is an unnecessarily flat proposition.
The most important relationship in this life is the one you have with yourself. This connection you have with yourself is the necessary foundation to everything else. When you’re well connected to yourself, you know who you are. When you know who you are, you are able to remain sturdy and steady as you adventure across the world. You are grounded while at the same time are open to the world. When you feel anchored, you go through life with the knowledge and blessings of the Universe. When this happens, growth happens on a personal level: we are able to be strong while remaining humble, confident and open to receiving inputs and feedback. This mentality makes for a more fulfilling life. It deepens our connections with ourselves, and it deepens our connections with the people around us.
But useful for us to note that there will always be people wanting to project things onto us, we, afterall, are all traumatised. This is another topic for another time, but for now, point is this: it is difficult to tell whether they really do have a point or if the thing they are projecting onto us is really all about them. It’s important to have deep, strong roots to take it all in without getting swayed or blown away. Not all information is good to hear; we need to develop a skill to ascertain the source of the information and the motives behind the source. We must know ourselves to know how to filter what we want to take in and what we will not consider. And this is hard. If you’re feeling like you’re losing yourself, then ground yourself. Go deep within. Set aside some time to isolate and reconnect to your instincts. Your door is always open to a million random opinions.
The version that I am drawn to is the one that is balanced: she has confidence in herself and remains humble, open and discerning. Some days, these come relatively easily, she feels strong, focused, knows what she’s doing, where she’s going while remaining open to truths that she doesn’t necessarily see. She is able to hear well-meaning advice and regards that as a part of the input of her decision-making process. And of course, she can respond assertively and tactfully. On the days that these things are harder, she still gives it her best. She forgives herself for the mistakes she made and then goes on to make new ones. Oh, she eats extra fried chicken on those days.
I think that’s a good adult.
Post note: this piece is intended to be reflective, never prescriptive. The keen-eyed amongst you would detect the rough edges from the rushed editing and I am sorry. Writing appears easy, but it is in fact, quite challenging. And I am also rather time-poor right now. I am learning to embrace imperfections and this is just part of the deal. Somewhat unrelated, but important: my dad woke at 2am Jakarta time to wish me happy birthday. Kidding. The rain woke him and he quickly sent a message before drifting back to sleep. It is the littlest things that unexpectedly give us the warmest affections. Love you dad.
