Are you spending your time on the right thing?

This particular blog is completely personal. I have not written in a while and I want to borrow this time from your life, my fellow reader, to just talk to you. First things first, I was having a particularly bad day today. It was the first day of my periods (for those of you who don’t know what “periods” are – it means menstruation). I have been rolling around with a hot bag all day and I did none of the things I wanted to get done today. I feel like a needy baby who wants to be taken care of and be given attention but my lower back hurts as if I am a 60 years old lady. I recently started re-reading a book I last read when I was 16 years old (I will come back to it). The best thing that happened to me today is that I found a mocha-mix in the kitchen pantry. IT IS DELICIOUS. You mix that stuff in hot water and it tastes like heaven. So, as I am writing this I am sipping a hot mocha, it is 8 degrees Celsius outside, my feet are super blue, and just a side note, I am going to turn 23 this month.

As most of you know, I am a superwoman. Growing up does not scare me and I have always been a fan of getting older because it has always symbolized freedom for me. For the longest time, my poems used to have birds in prisons or prisons in birds. I think age has allowed me to grow wings, both literally and figuratively. After a non-eventful and non-existent entry into a new year, I have finally mustered the courage to reflect back on 2021.

2021 was the year I did not think could be a chapter of my life. I moved across the country, I travelled, I fell in love, I worked out, I got into the best (body) shape of my life, I lived alone, I saw sea, mountains, river, stars, animals, moon, trees, plants. I ate the best food, I worked as a therapist, I got my hair chopped off, I got another piercing (although it did not work out), my sister got married, I danced and I sang. On the flip side– I self-harmed, I puked during an anxiety attack, I got my heartbroken, I cried by myself for hours, I had the worst migraine attack (I was alone in a new city while I nursed myself back to health) while my family was down with covid-19 and I was not with them for two months (everyone is healthy now). I got violated - emotionally and physically. I failed an exam. I sang in public for the first time and everyone made fun of me; I was unable to touch my guitar for the next 6 months. I did not paint. I hardly wrote.

Through everything, I kept counting my blessings. There were days I would legit talk myself through surviving one particularly hard night, after the other. I would lure myself to get myself a gift if I live one more night. It was such a lonely journey. This is not to say I was not surrounded by people. I think I owe my existence to my friends who have been so kind and generous to me irrespective of the person I was to them. I was so unreasonable most of the time just going on and on about what is new (usually the same old) that is hurting me today. But pain is personal, even when it is shared. That is the beauty of it. The best thing about hitting the rock bottom is you cannot go any lower, and that you have survived the worst of your days. If anything similar to what has already happened, happens again, you will get through it. You will find your way again. You will find yourself again. And if something completely new happens, well you are not supposed to know the answer so there goes the pressure to win or be perfect. I don’t know about you but this was such an important lesson for me – the bare bones of the harsh reality of life that whatever makes you wish you were dead eventually forces you to live.

The next best thing about hitting the rock bottom is now you are forced to think about what really matters to you. You are in survival mode. You have just enough energy to stay alive (sometimes not even that). I was re-reading The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. It is a really simple autobiography of a man writing and delivering his last lecture. I read it the first time when I was 16 years old and I kept selling it to everyone as my favorite book. This year I thought okay, I really need to remember what goes inside the book. I had completely forgotten what it was about that spoke to the 16 years old me. So, on a bad day such as today wherein, I was grieving by myself, hoping to find hope, I made myself sit with my kindle. And there it was – hope. I am not spoiling the book by telling you that Pausch wrote this book as a dying man with pancreatic cancer. At some point in the book, he had written in bold words – “Are you spending your time on the right thing?” The moment I read these words, I stopped reading, opened my laptop and started writing this blog. It hit me very hard how a lot of times we just spend our time existing as if our being as an individual is no big deal.

I needed someone to tell me that I am not valuing my life by spending it the way I have been spending it lately – life has been living me, instead of me living the life. Sometimes it is laborious and tiring to do whatever makes you happy. At least for me because god knows how much I ran away from spending time with myself in ways that would make me happy. I spent hours scrolling through social media hoping something would change and obviously, nothing did until I kept my phone aside and opened a damn book.

I know it takes energy to do that one little thing that can possibly make your life better when everything essentially sucks. One tends to crave for instantly gratifying sources of happiness because it seems like the only way to get to the next moment is by somehow feeling happy again. I realized that it never works though. If I try to make my life better simply on the basis of instant gratification, I am going to try the same again, hoping that it will stick. There is a second cigarette in the pack, and then the third one but none of them create a lasting effect of calm in my life. This is not to say that we don’t need to have quick fixes around ourselves.

I am saying we need to be constantly asking ourselves – Are you spending your time on the right thing? Someone once said to me that “anything worth doing is worth doing poorly,” and I think about it every day. Spend your time and energy on what is important to you. A year worth of consistent poor work can change a lot for you. Allow yourself to be happy again. Try to find love in new ways. It might seem like you have all the time in the world but sometimes it is worth not having everything; it reminds you of your human-ness which means you are allowed to fail, make mistakes, fuck things up, break down and try again.

I just want to end with this quote by Steve Jobs. After being voted out by the board members and losing his job at Apple, the company he co-founded, in 2005, at Harvard Graduation Speech, Jobs said,

“The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

Sometimes being a loser is the best thing that can happen to you. Try to be an active member of your life to set that trajectory for yourself. So, are you spending your time on the right thing?