July | 2021 | Negative To Positive

With the increasing pace of life and increasing access to various networks, you meet a ton of people and you are sometime lost. You start looking and judging yourself from others viewpoints. But you forget that even though they may be correct in their own way, they are at a different stage in life. They may have different ways of measuring success even if your goals and principles are the same. Even, if the way you think and do things, what you want to achieve, is quite similar, you may have taken different paths in life that led to different experiences. Also, essentially no two people are completely alike. Not even twins.

Sometimes you need to take a pause and stop being harsh on yourself

Instead of completely looking from other people’s perspectives, take those crucial points that are beneficial to You. Also, you need to remember that people’s perception of divas is very different. Some may attach a negative connotation to it and some positive. But even if you are a diva, there is nothing wrong with it. Be your own version of A Diva.

For many people, the last 1 year could have been very slow. Many also could have used this time to develop themselves further. But growth is always relative. It could be compared to yourself or to someone else, or even to your clan too. So, someone else’s growth could be more than yours or less than yours, but ONLY based on the factors that you use to measure yourself.

Taking my own example, anyone who has not known me before will judge me based on their criteria like how much I have learnt, how many new skills I have developed during this year. Or even on factors like, oh you gained weight, oh you don’t remember my mom’s bday, you are terrible. Or things like you don’t wake up at 6 in the morning, what will you achieve in life.

Even their kind words of concern may put people down if not said correctly. Hearing these kinds of things incessantly for over a year, especially from the ones you love, really brings one down. You start feeling you are really not good enough. But the truth is everyone has a different way of doing things. Waking up after 6 can also help you finish all the necessary tasks to grow, forgetting something while going being busy at work does not make you a terrible person, not being able to make sushi doesn’t make you non- marriageable material.

The truth is, I am a Diva in my own way, it is not too late to realize it either. Not everyone can understand your value and they don’t really have to, as long as you know what you can do. If I continue to look at myself from other people’s perspective, all I will see in myself is a person who has put on weight, a person who keeps crying, a person who is very lazy, a person who doesn’t know how to take care of oneself, a person who may not have achieved anything in some time.

But, if I actually take into account everything that has actually happened, it is not too bad. I came back home after 8 years, I could do without focusing on myself, but focusing on my house and family. I spent time cooking in Bangalore and didn’t have my mother’s food in a long time, I could do with taking it easy and letting her cook her delicious meals for me. I was going through a major breakup of my life along with a string of failures in several relationships, which led to me being extremely underconfident. It caused me to go into major depression. There are many who at that point may have decided to kill themselves. But I decided to live. I spent hours and days and months just convincing myself about how things will get better, I still do. But in spite of all this, in spite of just wanting to lie on my bed and cry for hours and days, I got out of the bed. On time. I took up my mother’s responsibilities of taking care of my dying grandmother. I took up the daily expenditure of my house and became the man of the house while my father was away due to the lockdown. I completed my education and got my master’s degree. I competed in competitions with people sitting all over India. I led and executed two major events of my college. I made new friends. I fell in love again. I bagged the second highest offer in my college during the time of Covid. I nursed back my parents to health. I started concentrating on taking in account how I want to look and chopped my hair.

Be Your Own Version of A Diva

Yes, I am a Diva. But it doesn’t stop there. I am now embarking onto a new phase. I am taking in the advice from friends and taking up things that do matter. To once again set up goals, to re-focus on myself, my health and my growth. I am not back to normal; I am still dealing with continuous dark thoughts thrown at me by my mind 24×7. I reached a very low point of my life but apart from a few non continuous days (maybe 20) from the vast 485 days where I let myself indulge into some alcohol and some smoking. I decided to get out of it through my sheer personal strength alone. Even when my nearest ones pushed me down further, I have set my eyes on a path of hope and light. Made changes to my requirements and goals and working a bit like before, to make things better.