Not Ignoring My Feelings

As a kid, I was always interested in computer software and hardware. It seemed to be the only thing that interested me. There was a moment when I was awkwardly sitting on a chair with my dad’s old Thinkpad laptop on a hot summer afternoon and trying to make some game, in the end, I made that game and used it as a return gift at one of my birthday parties. As I approached the high school I stopped doing anything productive, life was on repeat with school, home, and tuition. I was unable to make friends, and nor was I good in academics with no goals in life. The one word that came to mind to describe me at that time was “trash”. I felt that I was useless and a disgrace to my family. I always thought that people had a bad impression of me because I was not good at anything, which made it hard for me to trust people coming into my life. This is why at the end of my 10th grade, I decided that I need to change my life or else I am just going to lose the motivation to be myself. 

Compared to my high school days, in the last few years, I have been productive and achieved a lot of things that are considered to be the norm in society, like an undergraduate degree or a job. People close to me seem to be very happy about the fact that I have gotten to this point, but I am not satisfied with it. I kept wanting to do more and last month I reached my limit and broke down. 

I was not satisfied with where I was and felt that whatever I did was not enough. I often thought to myself if I was doing this to satisfy someone else to make them have a good impression of me, but I never found an answer to it. For a while, I ignored these feelings, but over time, I realized that they affected my mental well-being and my ability to be productive.

Overthinking little things had become my bad habit, people warned me about it but I chose to ignore it, and here I am facing the consequences of it now. I kept overthinking “my ability to be productive” and ended up not being productive and becoming demotivated. Unfortunately, this happened when my workload was the highest it had ever been. I was angry and annoyed at myself and decided that I needed to change this if I actually want to get to my goals. 

The biggest issue was not being able to manage my time well due to the heavy workload. To make things easier for myself, I decided to finally follow a schedule of waking up in the morning at a fixed time. I didn’t sense any changes at first but over time it made me more energetic and gave me time to plan out my day. Considering how it has positively affected my life affected I hope that I will be able to continue this.

This still did not solve my problem of me wanting to lead a balanced lifestyle. It was too much to handle for myself so I asked some people who I trusted, what I should do to balance it. A solution that intrigued me was to take a day off every week where I don’t touch any work and side projects. Initially, I thought it would make me feel more overwhelmed, but once I gave it a try I was surprised to see the results. Within two weeks of doing this, I felt more energetic and happy. Slowly that day became something I look forward to. Every week that day becomes a day where I can relax and do the things I like to do. Lastly, it helped me reset my mind before the next week started.

Doing all of these things to make my lifestyle better made me realize that I can find solutions to these problems if I just accept what I am feeling. This reminded me of the times when I failed in things like academics, work, and communicating with others. Failing at those and ignoring those feelings left me with long-term insecurities like being unable to trust people and having low self-esteem. Recently I have been interacting with a huge amount of people due to a business fellowship I joint. Interacting with these many people made me realize that I am unable to trust people easily and keep feeling that they have a bad impression of me. It was really hard to admit this to myself but now that I have accepted this, I can work towards improving myself in these aspects.

Regardless of my insecurities, working with all of these new people and stepping outside my comfort zone has made me grow in many ways. Me being put into situations outside my comfort zone is the thing that has forced me to acknowledge my feelings and do something about them. In the end, there are things I still need to work on. I need to be more firm with my choices and believe in myself more. My goal moving forward is to make sure that I don’t ignore different feelings that I experience and have more faith in people.