#but I won't be making like 3 gifsets per day or something like I used to before SKDFJH

[whenfatecollides]

a bit of a vent/update (it’s heavy). I’ve always dreaded the ‘where do you see yourself in 5 years?’ question because I honestly have never been able to picture anything for myself that felt real and tangible and something that I could actually want and achieve in the future. I would be like ‘yeah I want to be dating my future girlfriend by then’ or ‘yeah I want to be working a job that I actually like’ or ‘yeah I want to feel like I’m doing something meaningful with my life by then’ but it was all very superficial in a way, it felt like I was saying rehearsed words and although those are still things that I want, there’s a lot more detail to them now. tbh since I finished high school (almost 10 years ago at this point..) that I’ve felt really behind in life compared to my friends, and other people in general, but at the same time it took me 14/15 years to actually figure out what happened to me when I was a pre-teen and why I spent 10+ years of my life crippled by depression, so all things considered I think I came out of all that pretty okay. I started therapy about 5 years ago and altho it was a slow progress, I can at least say that I’m not on the verge of feeling suicidal anymore. I think being a teen on tumblr in 2010-2013 definitely didn’t help much with that either, the romanticisation of depression and self harm back then was Real and the last thing I should have been exposed to at the time. it was to the point that I actually tried to kill myself when I was 16, right before a family trip. I can talk about this now, but I can tell you all as well, this was a root of deep shame for me until 2020, when I finally had the courage to tell my mom and siblings about it, because it made me feel so ungrateful, stupid and generally a shit person for not appreciating everything good that I had, while at the same time it made me hate myself for not actually going through it fully, to the point that I always thought that I would take this to my grave without letting anyone know. at this point, I’ve forgiven myself for it and acknowledged that, despite how hurtful it was, this is a common pain and, unfortunately, many people know it too. No matter how much I convinced myself of it back then, I was never alone in that pain. At the same time I made really great friends here (some I’ve been friends with for over 10 years now), even met some of them in real life, and it was overall the place that made me feel comfortable enough to consider (and accept) that maybe I wasn’t straight. so not everything was bad.

it was a few weeks into 2022 when I finally figured out what had happened to me, why most of who I was so deeply lost in shame, to the point that it felt like I had been drowning most of my life. there were several things that contributed to it like, giving up who I was out of pressure to please my family (until I was around 23 - constantly hearing ‘you should let your hair grow’, ‘you should dress more like a girl’ etc etc when you’re a 10 year old really does a number), giving up the things I loved in order to pass as “normal”, my father not being emotionally available (or simply available in general tbh - unfortunately too common as well), my mom having to take care of 4 kids and therefore not really being emotionally available either, dealing with womanhood, puberty and all those nice, not at all confusing and hard, things by myself because I thought that if I could just ignore it it would not be real (a nice not at all dumb trait I got from my father - thankfully I’m over that), consequently emotionally abandoning my closest friends bc of all that further isolating myself. and I could go on and on, but the reason why I’m saying all this is that maybe it can spark a light in someone else too. Until this year, I thought that nothing had happened to me, that I had no reason to feel the way I did back then, and it was suffocating to think that while the pain I felt was very real. and you may ask ‘okay, where does shame come into the picture here?’ so here’s a few that I could identify from the things I said above - shame for my sexuality (giving up things I loved to pass as “normal”), shame for being gender non conforming (pressure to please my family), shame for not feeling connected with my parents (having friends who do have good relationships with theirs), shame for not having the life they expect of me, shame for not having the life I think I’m supposed to have to “impress” my friends, therefore hiding away, isolating myself, further convincing myself that no one else was going through the same. until I realised that, of course, I would never find other people talking about how they felt the same, because we were all hiding away.

this isn’t a story about how suddenly I’m cured from depression or anything like that, there’s still days and days, but figuring out why I felt the way I did back then was a major step towards finding healing, and I feel like I’ve been changing very rapidly over the past 5 months because of it. recognizing that my self-criticism was doing more harm than good (I wouldn’t talk to my friends the same way I talk to myself sometimes..), that I can choose self-compassion instead, and the good-old exercising, journaling, reading, eating and sleeping well, really made major differences (as well as keep going to therapy of course, it was important to have someone trained to talk about the really heavy and more complicated stuff).

in the end, this has been a journey towards (re)finding myself, and I finally have an answer to the question that I found so dreadful ‘where do you see yourself in 5 years?’. and for the first time in my life, I’m not afraid to try, I’m not afraid to fail, I’m not afraid of the set backs I may face. for the first time in my life, I can actually picture a future for myself, and I’m actually excited to see myself getting there. I don’t have it all figured out, but I do know that I’m persistent. in the end, I think this is also a bit of a letter to everyone who’s lost in life, I’m currently 27 and I’m now figuring out a path that I might actually enjoy to take and that makes sense to me. If you’re like me, you probably also feel like you’ve run out of time and that there’s no way you can still turn your life around, but to be honest, who really knows how much time we have left? You make a little bit of time now, and deal with tomorrow, 3 months, 5 years from now, when it comes. I have no idea what turns life will still take and where I’ll end up after all, but I do know that recognizing my pain, owning up to the shameful feelings I had (and still have), accepting my feelings and thoughts as they are (failing a lot and trying again), definitely took me from a drowning person to a vivid swimmer. I’ve always liked to share my thoughts here, but recently having the number of followers increase on this blog has made it feel quite... intimidating to share pieces of my life like before. still, this was something I felt was important for me to share, even if just to say, feeling lost and behind in life is a normal part of the human experience.