You Don’t Have to Do it All Alone
Especially If You CAN Do it All Alone
As the oldest daughter in my household, guess who’s the most hyper-independent human being in the family?
Brownie points for correctly guessing it, drum rolls, me!
Yes all you hyper-independent beings out there, yes you can do it all by your lonesome.
But that makes the process so painful. Not to mention lonely and depressing.
Before we move on, if you have a Medium membership, please consider reading it there. Substack hasn’t enabled payments in my region yet. But you can continue reading for free here too :)
As the cliche goes, the journey matters more than the destination. You are going to spend more time on the journey than the destination because as soon as you reach that destination, within a few weeks, you will be eye-ing that next destination and yet again you will find yourself on the journey. The lonely, full of spiraling and pulling yourself out of the spiraling journey.
It just doesn’t feel good. Yes, you come out successful but you have no one to rant to about how unfair these interview short-listing standards are. How you’re sending a dozen cold emails every day but get a response once in a blue moon and then even that slips through your fingers because you got nervous during the interview.
Once you say your problems out loud, they lose their power. They lose their ability to inflict emotional pain on you.
Once you rant back and forth between friends, everybody sharing their struggles, there is a good chance at least one of your friend’s problems is way bigger than yours. A once-a-week-crying session with friends is a pretty underrated therapy.
And I don’t know why but once you start trauma-sharing, especially in a group of five to six people, it all just becomes as though somebody mixed laughing gas in the air.
I don’t know why but laughing over trauma with friends makes it less painful. Makes it feel like oh well, it is what it is. We’ll find a way to tackle this.
Companionship eases pain.
Companionship heightens joy.
Companionship heals in ways you’d never expect.
Be proactive in building a healthy friend circle around you.
In my over two decades of experience living on this earth, I have found just one, and only one thing builds those genuine, hearty, don’t-have-to-try-too-hard connections.
Self-Less-Ness.
Author’s Note: This is a new writing style I’m experimenting with, let me know in the comments if its a little too off or if it was nice reading it.