mireiastreia

[mireiastreia]

no questions please, i beg of the world

I remember the times where I hated being asked questions where I did not know the answer, especially when it was in a public setting. A part of me felt so tense and almost angry and anxious at the same time - it felt like an attack on me when people asked me questions, especially questions that I could not answer right then and there.

Here’s what was in my head then: I should have been able to answer that, why can’t I answer a basic simple question, my brain blanked out, what’s wrong with me, why am I such a failure that I am incapable of answering something without feeling like an imposter, they will find out I don’t know what I’m doing.

And on the occasions someone calls me out for either not answering or answering wrongly: I feel like a complete failure, I feel humiliated, I just feel completely awful for not knowing the 'right' answer.

That mindset right there, totally due to my own life experience. We are not born with the tendency to berate ourselves into dust - negative self talk is not our passion or calling in life, it’s a poison that we picked up from the people around us.

In my case, well, my parents expected me to excel in every academic thing that I did and discouraged extracurriculars. While that in itself is not too bad to deal with, they expected me to know a lot by myself and made fun of me if I didn’t know the ‘right’ answer. I was a literal child and this was before the age of Google - this normal thing was portrayed as abnormal.

Didn’t help matters that growing up the way I did, I learned to tie my self worth to my achievement. I’m great if I achieved something but if I achieved nothing, I am nothing - that’s not exactly a healthy mindset to have as both a child and an adult but that was what I had to unlearn in order to learn to feel safe about not knowing something.

I’m still going through the process of unlearning, but hey, we are all works in progress right? It’s all a natural part of life and we are all still learning, one way or another. Right now, I am learning what peace feels like in my own mind and I hope everyone knows peace too.

[mireiastreia]

reflections on the world we live in

How we experience the world is affected by our perception of the world that we live in - or so people say. I used to believe that the world is not on my side, that whatever good thing I have will always be taken away.

Funny thing about our brain, we have a heightened sensitivity towards negativity and negative cues - we notice more bad things happen compared to the good things, and whenever bad things happened in my life, I saw it as more proof supporting my belief that the world is not on our side, the side of the little people trying to make something out of the life we are currently living. And so the downward spiral continued, spilling out into reality and making a mess out of my life - that was a few years ago.

Luckily my life have changed for the better since I slowly stopped running away from everything and started to look within. It took me years to get to this point, and I’m still not done growing. Yet I am grateful all the same for all the positive things and the peace of mind I am able to have in my life.

I’m happy with what I have now - and that is something I never thought I would be able to say a few years ago. Here’s to more positive growth for years and years to come for us all.