26

“All of the adversity in our life is to initiate us into greatness. It’s to call out something greater in us.”

26 years young. For the first time, I feel no rush with my life. Jokes I do, but there is some grace around this year’s birthday. With all that’s happened in the past few months, I think I’ve done my part in wallowing in the brokenness and really embraced the change that I am about to embark on.

As with many others, birthdays usually come with a mix of positivity and negativity. You get the negativity from having a temporary life crisis, now that you’re a year older, trying to figure out what you need to do with your life (if you havent solved that part yet). And then it often gets balanced out by the positivity from the birthday wishes from your loved ones.

That’s usually how it goes with me every year. But this year, it feels different.

There’s a certain ponder that’s permeating the air. I can’t quite put my finger on this “ponder”, but as opposed to the usual feel-good writing I share, what I am currently writing is a bit more serious.

Perhaps it’s because I’m now on the closer side towards 30.

Or perhaps it’s the gravitas of everything that’s happened, forcing an unprecedented reckoning of a need to build myself.

Whatever the reason is, for the first time, I’m looking forward and not back.

Here are some lessons that have weighed on my mind in the eve of my 26th birthday.

Embrace the hard

They say that success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

I think this lesson hit me hardest when I realised this:

The past makes you strong, but living in it, makes you weak.

The past year has been cathartic to say the least. In just 12 months, I’ve been able to experience all of the following:

• Getting made redundant for the first time

• Travelling solo for two months which was full of new experiences and bucket items being ticked

• Starting a new career in venture capital

• Training for a physical pursuit for the first time

• Failing my marathon, with some serious health complications following

• Dealing with grief of an unexpected death of a close friend

The turbulence in events and all of the emotions attached has made all the more harder to deal with but it’s here in this difficulty that I’ve learned that life will break you first in order for you to really grow.

I've had my fair share of tough times, but never have I had to deal with such severity all at once. It truly feels like a fall from grace. Going from the highs of travelling the world, starting a new career, reaching physical peaks to now trying to pick up all the broken pieces.

I’ve had what I would call “micro-doses” of adverse moments that force a change in my schema, and outlook but never had this happened in my life.

And I tell myself that it’s all part of life, what makes it all the more harder is that it’s the first time I’ve had to try handle these emotions.

The truth is that life will break us and rebuild us, and these often happen in cycles, except every cycle you come back even stronger.

Your skin grows thicker.

You learn to grit your teeth a tad harder.

You feel less sorry for yourself.

You embrace the challenges, even feeling borderline excited of what’s to come next knowing well and truly that the next adversity is inevitable. A non-negotiable part of living.

It sounds pessimistic for me to say, but i do believe that having this mindset where you embrace hard shit, helps fortify the mind.

It sounds cheesy, but they say life happens for you, not to you.

Don't marry the script

Put simple, I had idealised my entire year to go a certain way. It's year 2024, and with my attachment with Kobe Bryant - it was scripted to be one of highs and achievements. As hard as I tried to eventuate the plans, it didn't fall through unfortunately. I thought if I did this then x would lead to y, and so forth. But life has it that you can never plan things to perfection and sometimes looking too far ahead can cause diversion away from what's at hand. Being attached to what I had envisioned only caused for bigger upset. That's not to say don't have a plan or not manifest the outcomes, but remember that curveballs are inevitable.

Time waits for no one

It’s not a knock on myself but I do believe that more/longer you attach yourself to what could’ve been, you’re just living in a fantasied reality.

It takes you away from reality and traps you from living the present.

The more time you spend in the past, the less time you have creating your future.

I’ve been and am still guilty of this. In fact it’s a byproduct of my enneagram type 4 personality. ”They often tend to wallow in and romantically overindulge themselves in this state of brokenness. It’s something they can control and build upon in their mental structure of how the world works and how they fit into it. They want to be seen and their suffering acknowledged but they do tend to overemphasise with it therefore trapping themselves in an illusionary cage of their own making.”

As hard as the pill is to swallow, feeling sorry for yourself doesn't help change the outcome. If anything, it just feeds mind, soul and body with negativity, letting it manifest into a parasite. Unless you don’t fix cut this parasite out of your system, it’s only going to grow and grow.

The sooner you make a decision on how you want a situation to consume you or how much energy you give to something; the quicker you’ll be able to re-immerse yourself into the present.

It’s this speed to decision that can make or break your path to healing.

Make a decision, and make it quick.

Dr Joe Dispenza puts it quite frankly:

“If you keep the same routine as yesterday, it makes sense that your tomorrow is going to be a lot like your yesterday. Your future is just a rerun of your past. That’s because your yesterday is creating your tomorrow.”

Taking pride in your imperfections

In the midst of this all, there’s one overarching theme that has helped provide a north star for myself. It’s this Japanese philosophy known as Kintsugi.

Kin Tsugi, or ‘golden joinery’ is the ancient Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with tree sap dusted in luminous powdered gold. Through the art of kintsugi, broken objects are treated with respect, and by reassembling and repairing them with precious materials, are rendered beautiful and whole again. While the process of kintsugi may illuminate imperfections, these golden threads add further character and elegance and reveal an object’s history.

To me, this philosophy allows us to realise that there’s  beauty in our imperfections. It gives us the grace to reconsider what we feel is broken and see all parts of ourselves, the good, bad, shattered and flawed as parts of our whole selves. It’s a bit similar to the scene in Inside Out 2 where all the emotions seek to embrace Riley’s identity — all of the good and bad.

As much as these moments are overwhelming, I know deep down that these will pass. It’s with the mindset of kintsugi that has given me a silver lining.

The silver lining for me is that whatever change will come after this, will enable me, to inspire others. And not for the sake of stroking ego, but to give meaningful impact to those who matter to me.

---

As a closing remark, to anyone reading this, whatever it is you are going through, be kind to yourself and give yourself the grace necessary to process your emotions. It’s often in our lowest moments, we learn our true selves.

Feel the extremes of what you’re going through, but love yourself enough to decide when to stop. Keep rolling with the punches, you got this.