As we grow older, the way we experience life grows more complex. The brutal reality of life is that we can’t control everything that will happen to us and there are some things that we will never understand. However, the way that we process different events and how we decide to let them shape us has an influence on the people we will grow into being. I think that coming to accept that can be a big step in learning how to process the good and the bad in life, so here is my advice on how to do this.
Handling Heartbreak
When I was 16, I got cheated on and broken up with for the first time. As anyone who has experienced that knows, it’s incredibly hard to understand such actions and not blame yourself for the outcome of your relationship, especially at such a young age. However, the plus side of going through such a difficult breakup is that you can now focus on yourself.
Although it can seem like a hard thing to do when you still feel so caught up in the emotions surrounding the breakup, it can be really helpful to set goals for yourself. I have found that even a general goal can give you the motivation you need to get out of bed in the mornings. For me, it was getting into a good college and building strong friendships. I started focusing on school, taking challenging classes and making an effort to connect with my teachers. I also started reaching out to people and decided to build a soccer team with a friend from my school. The girls that joined the team are still some of my closest friends today.
If you’ve ever come out of a breakup and felt like you don’t have many friends you can go to, you aren’t alone. Even though making the effort to reach out to people might be hard at first, you may find some amazing people you didn’t even know were out there.
Navigating School Stressors
It’s safe to say that high school was a very difficult time for me, as it is for many. I started at a new school where I was quickly excluded and bullied by my peers. Because it was around the same time as my breakup, focusing on my classes seemed like a good way to help me cope with both the bullying and the heartbreak. I figured that if I studied hard, I would be able to go to a college I could feel proud of, it seemed like a good way out of a difficult time in my life.
All of this led me to try to understand how I could see these challenging events in a positive light.
I started to play around with different metaphors, trying to find a silver lining to these several difficult months. I wanted to find a way of thinking that I knew could help me get through anything similar in the future, something that I could say I got out of my awful high school experience. The idea of attributing an experience to a color came back to me. It was a simple way to categorize different emotions associated with a specific time in my life. After all, it’s not unheard of to associate memories to color, anyone who has watched “Inside Out” would be completely unphased by the idea.
accepting new experiences
At the end of the day, you internalize each new experience and what you take away from it becomes a part of you just like each color you collect becomes a part of the portrait of you. An oil painting needs many different colors and shades, many layers and many textures. No matter the experience, it will add color to who I am. In the end, the more colors I can include in the portrait of myself, no matter how little or large the amount I use, the more diverse and beautiful it will be.
Each one of your experiences in life will add depth to your person, will teach you something new and will add more colors to the portrait of yourself that you are painting. Although metaphors don’t fix the biggest problems in our lives, I have found that this one can help you look for something to take away from any situation emerge from.Â
Overall, it is important to find strategies that work for you when facing new experiences.