Don’t define your standards by those of others

Hey there! I would like to share an experience I had around September with you guys because I learnt a really important life lesson from it.

So, I had been feeling really down for a while and I “felt” like I had an issue serious enough to go for counseling in school. It was quite funny because I think throughout the course of the time I visited the counselor, let’s call her Mrs Jane, I subconsciously was expecting her to fan my ego by telling me what a great and enviable person I was and how all the forces that seemed to be against me right then were kind of like enemies of progress and all those kinds of things sha (lol- Self deception at its peak).

Well, I didn’t get any of that. Instead, I got a reality check and that was the fact that a large chunk of the problem stemmed from me being unable to communicate with people properly and when necessary and some sort of subtle pride that I had rooted in a dusty corner of my mind. It wasn’t that Mrs Jane said it or anything but the things she didn’t say were way louder than those she did say and in the end, I didn’t get that subconscious affirmation and justification of my actions that I wanted but I did get what I needed a wakeup call. But you know how you sometimes wake a person up by calling out their names, and they still don’t get up; you’ll probably have to take a further step by splashing them with cool water till they did get up. Well, that’s what happened to me next because it seemed like for everyone I was going to meet for this issue I had, I unknowingly kept setting myself up to be tackled.

So, I went to see another person, a lecturer this time (I’m deep, I know), let’s call him Dr. Seyi, and explained to him that I felt like I had no direction, didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life and was actually feeling pressured because I was working on building up my CGPA and not letting the people around me down and that I also felt like I still needed to “achieve more” in life because the internet had increasingly made the standard of living higher and people worldwide, specifically me, wanted to keep up with the changing trends. However, he simply explained to me that people are different so comparing myself with others and self-depreciating because I felt underachieved or stuck in a phase of moving through life without a purpose isn’t the way forward. Instead, I needed to first stop using what I saw on the internet (and the media in general) as the yardstick for what my life needed to look like and focus on finding my own self and purpose in life according to God’s plan for me because to be honest, a lot of the lives that the internet is used to portray are fake to even begin with.

Those conversations were my splashes of cool water and I’m glad I got them because I am fully awake now and I really hope that this will help someone reprioritize today. Your yardstick or standards for prioritizing shouldn’t be what you see online or in the media, it should be God’s plan and purpose for your life; that is what you need to discover and pursue.

GraceOla