Over the past few months I’ve been really questioning who I am. The thing that gets me is that over the past year I feel like I’ve already figured her out: what she wants, what she likes, who she aspires to be. But the more I think about it, I start to realize that I went through the same cycle the year before, and the year before that, and so on. It’s funny because it’s almost frustrating to me, every single year I feel like I’ve come so far. I’ve become so much stronger, I now handle situations with more and more grace, work at making sure I conduct myself in the most mature way, and overcome the battles that I have every day in my own mind. And now I find myself getting angry because I keep wondering, “if I’ve come so far and dealt with so much, why do I still feel as if I am back at where I started?”
I think this constant moving forward, yet feeling like you’ve regressed is a universal experience. I could be completely wrong, but I have a feeling that at some point or another, everyone looks back at their past self – whether it was six months or five years ago – and thinks “I was so naive,” or “I had no idea what I was doing at that point in my life.” But it’s almost insane to me that while you sit there in the present, looking back on the past and thinking about how far you’ve come, your past self was doing that exact same thing a year ago.
There’s a lot of different directions I could go with this idea, but since I’m a firm believer in energies and the universe playing a role in our lives, I’m going to go down that route. I know a lot of you reading this will agree and have beliefs that are similar to mine, and for those of you who don’t, I hope you can have an open mind as you continue to read.
As you go through life you face a myriad of different challenges, and I personally don’t think that these challenges present themselves coincidentally. Have you ever heard of the idea that the universe places exactly who/what you need in your life at the perfect time? This is what I eventually realized. Although I somewhat knew this was happening already, it made so much more sense in this context. I had to look back on my life 2 years ago; the girl I was when I was going into my first year of university, the people I was surrounded by, what I had overcome at that point in my life and what I was going through then. The way I navigated my life was through the lessons I had learned from people and situations in my past. Yes, I was younger and now I look back and I think that I didn’t know anything, but at that point in time it was exactly what I needed to get through my next challenges.
It’s a really crazy concept to think that everyone and everything in your life is there for a reason, but honestly it makes so much sense. The universe places these things, people, situations, etc. in your life at the correct times so that you either keep them there because it works for you and makes you better, or so you realize that it’s not working for you, ultimately learning a lesson from it. Think about it, have you ever had the same unfortunate situation happen to you over and over again but with a different person? That’s because the universe wants you to learn that lesson so that you can graduate to the next challenge in your life. If you don’t learn what the universe is trying to tell you the first time around, it will place you in the same situation and even make it gradually worse over and over again. Once you learn this lesson, you’re ready for the next step.
Now every time you learn a lesson, you feel better about the situation. It’s pretty much a form of closure. This closure teaches you how to navigate the next setting you’re put in, it allows you to gain more knowledge about yourself, or it can help develop your moral compass. I think this is where I thought I was done. That sigh of relief after I got through something so hard for me, and I had learned so much about myself. I felt so proud of how far I’ve come and what I had learned, only to be placed in another whirlwind of something I thought I couldn’t handle.
The thing is, every challenge you face in life, every experience you have, it shapes you into the human you are destined to be. It puts you one step closer to being the best version of yourself, and the happiest version at that. The thing that gets me is that we all end up dealing with different situations, and navigating our way through life on a different course. The universe tailors each experience, and works to give you what you need in order to grow and move on to the next step. While realizing this makes me feel better, the hardest thing for me to understand is that this cycle of the universe constantly giving me tough situations in order to grow and be better, is never going to end. Even when I think I’ve come so far, learned so much, or think that I am the very best version of myself, there is still going to be room to grow. I think I’ve had to settle with the fact that this isn’t a bad thing, and I shouldn’t give up. The best lesson I’ve learned so far is that an optimistic outlook really does go a long way. If I look at the constant cycle and keep dreading the next thing, I’m never going to be proud of who I am, I’m never going to be happy. But the world is full of knowledge and life is full of lessons. I’m sure it would be impossible to learn all of them in the short twenty-one years that I’ve been alive. And so I will tackle the next curveball the universe throws at me, because at least now I know it’s going to make me even prouder of myself than I already am today.