There comes a time every few months or so where I feel like I’m falling apart. My laundry is piling up, important tasks aren’t getting done, and between school and work, I feel like I’m spread too thin. I’ve always been an overachiever and an overcommitter. I take on a lot, and if I’m not managing it all perfectly, I tend to get really self critical. I feel small and young and disorganized. I feel like I haven’t learned a thing or grown at all since I was a teenager.
In times like this, I need to remind myself to look around. I need to remind myself to have a little grace for the person I’ve become. I need to look beyond all the ways I feel like I’m failing and focus on the smaller details of my life. It’s in these smaller details that I’m able to recognise that I have in fact been growing over the last three and a half years. Here are three little things that remind me that I’m not the same girl I was in highschool.
- My plants are alive
In highschool, I genuinely did not have the capacity to be responsible for another life form. Not even one as low maintenance as a succulent. I killed air plants, cactuses, all the things that you almost have to try to kill. I would forget to water them, accidently leave them in the darkest corners of my room where sunlight never reached, knock them over and then pick them up and not do anything about the fact that there was almost no dirt left in the pot, and then I would forget to throw them away. I lived my life in the continued proximity of their corpses.
And yet here I am. Senior year of college, with two thriving plants in my custody. Both of my plants, Rodrick and Boyo, have been with me for over a year. They are happy, healthy, and even growing. I have even repotted them at appropriate times in their respective lives. That’s growth. That’s something to be proud of.
- My arts and crafts box is organized
I have always been someone who enjoyed the occasional craft. I’ve always had a bunch of random supplies and miscellaneous buttons, ribbons, materials, etc. In highschool, all of this was just shoved in a drawer. Trying to find a specific paintbrush, or heaven forbid, a new hot glue stick, was a nightmarish endeavor.
At this current moment in my life, however, my arts and crafts supplies are stored in a container that is conveniently and intuitively organized. My paints have their own little box, while my crafts supplies are stored in a different one. All of my canvases and paper are in one place, and my brushes have their own little bag. All of this stacks neatly into a storage container that fits neatly in my coat closet. And that’s not all. While I was home in Colorado one summer, I reorganized my craft drawer from highschool in a similarly convenient and intuitive way. So all of my arts and crafts supplies, in my college home and my home town home, are organized. That’s growth. That’s something to be proud of.
- I have, and am using, a planner
I’m notoriously scatterbrained and forgetful. I’m also a notorious procrastinator. For as long as I can remember people have been trying to get me to use a planner. Teachers, parents, my older sister Kayla, everyone kept saying I had to start writing things down and keeping track of things on something outside of my head. And up through my freshman year of college I tried. I bought a planner each year. I would mark down people’s birthdays and other important dates, and I would use it consistently for maybe one week. After one week (and that’s being generous) I would start to forget to write things down, forget to check it, forget to bring it with me, and eventually it just wouldn’t feel worth it to pick it back up again.
I’m not sure what changed, when it changed, or how it changed, but after not even trying to use a planner my sophomore and junior years of college, I somehow find myself able to do it this year. Maybe it’s because I decided to do it on my own terms. I decided it was something I needed rather than having someone else tell me that it was something I needed. Maybe it was out of necessity. At this moment in my life I’m juggling school, an internship, a new leadership position with SPU’s Her Campus chapter, working as a nanny, and a blossoming social life. My schedule is the least structured it’s maybe ever been, and I just reached a point where I need a tangible tracker. Whatever it was, here I am, and while I might not cross off everything on my list everyday, the fact that I even have, and am using, a planner is a significant milestone. That’s growth. That’s something to be proud of.
When life gets hard and things get busy, it’s easy to feel like you’re not enough (or maybe you’re just super well balanced and don’t relate to this at all). But being young, and being a college student, and balancing all that comes with that is not easy. We deserve a little grace and recognition for the progress we have made, no matter how small or inconsequential that progress may seem. By taking a new perspective, I’m positive we can all find something to be proud of.