Well, a lot has changed in the matter of a month.
I was in a great mood the last time I wrote. Everything felt like it was on the up-and-up. I was working six days a week, on a good financial track, starting to embrace being single and alone again.
The morning after that post I got fired from my bread-winning job. It was completely out of the blue and one month later, I’m still kind of shocked by it.
I was going through the same motions for months, so suddenly losing that income and daily routine threw me for a loop. I already ended a relationship, so losing a job soon after made everything feel shaky.
I’ve spent the past month mostly numbing myself out from it. It’s weird to go from no time for yourself to most days alone again. Some days I feel freed by it, others it overwhelms me.
Life truly can uproot you at any moment. We all know this in the back of our heads, but we’re hardly prepared for when it happens.
With COVID-19 numbers rising, restaurants are getting slower by the day. I don’t know exactly what to do when my job shuts down for carry-out again. I spent the first round of quarantine working at a grocery store slowly losing my mind. It feels weird to not being doing that again. The job was a lot to handle at times, but I hate the feeling of something being taken from you without your consent.
I’ve never been fired from a job before.
I had two jobs earlier this year as well, but lost the hotel job due to COVID. Everyone lost their job though. I never saw that as being let go, but as something that had to be done at the time. It sucked, but I only worked there two days anyway.
The grocery store was my full-time gig and paid well. I won’t get in to why I got fired, but they let go of a decent amount of people. It was messy and I still feel wrong about it.
I will say though, I was becoming emotionally exhausted. I was doing the six day schedule for a couple of months on hardly any sleep. I spent my only day off with my boyfriend and even then, I’d come home to a list of errands I didn’t have time to do throughout the week.
The schedule wasn’t sustainable at all. I felt like I had to prove to myself I could do it though.
It sucks being 24 and thinking you should be further in life. I touched on this in my last post, but shit, this birthday really got to me.
Doing the two jobs made me feel financially secure and productive in my adult life. Now, I work 2-4 days a week serving.
I love my restaurant job though. I’m lucky my friend got me in there. It’s been such a blessing in such a weird period of my life.
I think about this time two months ago. I was on a trip with my boyfriend and his roommates. I was working at 7am all the time only to be at my other job by 3. My life has done a total 180 in a matter of two months.
Thing is though, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing if it weren’t for all of the trouble. I’m more well-rested than ever. I have time to just sit here and be with myself again. I have a lot of control around my days again which is something I wished for months ago.
The amount of breakdowns I had due to stress was starting to kill me.
I used to preach this to myself all the time, but it’s true. I remember writing about it back in 2017 when I left my manager job.
If something is causing you pain and feels forced, you have to let it go.
As much as I wanted to bury those feelings, they were bound to come up eventually. You can only numb yourself and avoid what’s going on with you for so long.
My mind tries to convince me that because other people can handle worse, I should be able to handle anything. Other people aren’t us though.
We all aren’t meant to carry every burden.
There’s a different meter of extreme for everyone.
The things I do with no issue might be something someone else avoids at all costs. Just as the things that knock me down prove to be nothing to them.
It doesn’t make either of us less than. We’re all just different people living out a different life experiences.
I’m not someone who is meant to have all of their freedom drained from them. I need the sleep. I need the down time. I need the ability to make choices and not have things decided for me.
It’s strange though.
These are things I’ve been craving for months and now that I have them, I’m still not satisfied. I don’t know what to do with myself. I tell myself to be productive so I do my little errands, clean, budget, the whole life-plan thing.
Once the day ends, I’m at a loss. It suddenly feels like I’ve accomplished nothing and I’m wasting my time. I engulf myself in YouTube or TikTok to distract myself.
It’s hard to make a plan in 2020 though. We’ve seen how quickly everything can change and even with losing my job, I don’t trust planning anymore. I would’ve never thought my year would end the way it is, but here we are, rolling with the punches.
It’s hard when you feel like the world keeps spinning and you don’t know how to go along with it. I have a million things I want to accomplish in this life yet never know where to start.
I’ve been reading Atomic Habits lately and he touched on this in a chapter. Instead of building our habits, we sit around and think about them. When we do act, we hit the ground running for a day or two, but inevitably fail. Life is all about creating micro habits to eventually get you to those bigger goals, but when we don’t see progress immediately or have a flop day, we succumb to that feeling of failure and abandon our plans altogether.
It’s a messy cycle.
I know to achieve the life I want, I can’t sit around waiting for it to happen to me. I have to take action in the direction of those wishes.
I’ve spent the majority of the past month feeling sorry for myself and drinking my problems away.
Nowhere near the healthiest mindset, but sometimes we need to grieve the direction we thought we were going.
It sucks when a relationship ends or a job is lost. Those sectors make up such a huge part of our lives, so it’d be foolish of me to continue on like I wasn’t feeling hurt. I needed a month of processing and just letting myself feel it out.
With the holidays coming up though and a new year on the horizon, I always end up reflective around this time. I look back at where I was a year ago or even six months ago. I tend to use my birthday as another reflective period since it falls on June 14th – right in the middle of the year.
Internally I don’t feel like much has changed about me personally, just life circumstances.
However, I was scrolling through my camera roll the other night and I don’t really recognize who I was last year. I chopped my hair off, abandoned social media, and focused solely on my relationship. I let my other friendships hit the back burner and let work and love take over my life.
While I don’t regret a second of it, I see how much I need to come back to myself. I lost a lot of who I was as an individual. This is through no fault of anyone other than myself. I was never made to feel smaller, I just put myself there. These habits started even in 2018.
I spent so much time alone when I moved here after high school. I was tired of it, so it’s no surprise to me I went back to my teenager mindset of focusing my life around friend groups.
I forgot how bad that put me in to a depression back then though. Losing yourself in the presence of others is a recipe for confusion. You start to forget a lot of core information about yourself. At least I do. There’s this side to me that’ll sit here and write out my feelings, but my social side focuses solely on being light hearted, making jokes. Both sides are me, but when I lean too much to one side, I start to feel like I’ve abandoned the other. I want them to co-exist, but I still have yet to find that balance.
Balance is a tricky concept because we’ll never truly feel fulfilled by it.
I can’t remember a single time in my life where I strived for balance that I ever felt it. It’s a constant journey to create a world where everything goes our way.
We don’t have the control we wish to have in the world. A lot of life is curveballs given to us to grow us. We were never meant for an up-hill trajectory. It’s supposed to feel wobbly – however, it doesn’t make it any less painful at times.
I’m not sure what the next few months of life holds. I’m sure you’re not either. The world has this layer of uncertainty around it due to the pandemic, but there’s comfort in knowing most of us are feeling this way. With our own issues, own struggles.
We’re all just trying to survive and I try to remind myself how much of a miracle it is that I made it to the holidays. My family made it. Jobs and relationships aside, my physical health remained safe and I will never take that for granted.
I’m not sure how many of y’all read these anymore since I write sporadically, so if you get anything out of these, thank you.
Writing is such a beautiful release for our souls as corny as that sounds.
Our minds like to race a mile a minute, so sitting down to write what’s going on up there tends to make things clearer. I started using my personal journal again and it’s been a life-saver.
If you’ve ever thought about writing, I highly highly recommend The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.
It’s a exercise book that gives you prompts and questions to write out weekly along with doing morning pages (writing 3 pages of free-hand thought first thing in morning.) It’s truly one of the most life-changing books I’ve read.
I might have to read it again honestly. I’m ready for a reset.
Life feels so different as of late, but I know this is only a phase. Everything is always in motion, so my problems of today won’t mean much a year from now. Things always have a way of working themselves out and in ways you’d never expect.
Losing my job scared the shit out of me for what is next, but I think it was the push I needed. I’m hardly employed and single again. These are the times of my life I’ll look back on and miss which seems weird considering how it sounds.
Thing is, the times we’re alone and given a chance to re-evaluate what we’ve been doing is when the most significant change happens. I have so much to look forward to that I’m unaware of right now.
It’s all working itself out.
For you, for me, whatever that may mean.
It’s about trusting the process and doing the things that feel right daily.
It’s only when we’re living the way we want to live that we end up in places we never thought possible.
❤️❤️❤️❤️