I’m not here to look perfect.
Honestly, I’m really not.
But I won’t lie to you; that was my goal in the beginning. I started my blogging journey with a dream, and it was to become something more than I am now. Although there’s nothing wrong with aspiration, the problem with being idealistic is that it often entails feeling like the place you’re currently in just doesn’t suffice.
Complacency is definitely the enemy of success, but then again, so is contentment. From now until the moment I succeed, I’ve programmed myself to believe that there is something inherently wrong with who and what I am today, therefore I must do everything in my power to change.
And I’ll be real here– it’s been a good framework to live by.
Well, up until now.
Now, I’m halfway into the first semester of my second year of college and I feel like I’m getting more and more burnt out by the day. I’m not exactly failing anything, but I’m not excelling anywhere either. Everything in my life has taken the backburner– my academics, the blog, my social life, and my personal life. You’d think that would mean I must be prioritizing one thing more than the other, but really, I’m not prioritizing anything.
That’s the problem, I believe: Right now, nothing is of true importance to me.
It might be a little dramatic to say, but I seemed to have lost meaning in what I do.
The last time I wrote a truly vulnerable blog post on here was sometime last March. I was living the beginnings of a very rocky situation in my personal life, and I was struggling to push past all my emotional turmoil. I did poorly in my final semester of freshman year, because I had fallen too deep into my vast of self-pity and mental turbulence. Things only got worse over summer when even more upsetting news broke out. Just when I thought I was healing, I was thrown back into my depression as if I had never gotten out of it in the first place. I took my month-long vacation to the States as a time to regroup and recharge. Coupled with the chaotic experience of having my Instagram temporarily disabled, I had a lot of trauma I was dealing with all at once that I simply felt required more than 4 weeks to recover from.
By the time summer ended, I more or less mellowed down. The breakdowns came less frequently, the insomnia sorted itself out, and my overall disposition had brightened up even fractionally. I wasn’t fully healed yet, but it was a start, for sure.
Now, I’m smack dab in the middle of the new semester, and I’d be lying if I said I’ve changed monumentally.
In all honestly, I’ve experienced a few relapses recently that my friends have been privy to during my spur-of-the-moment outbursts. It hasn’t been pretty, for sure, but I suppose healing never really is anyway.
But I’m not writing this to gain you pity. In fact, that’s the last thing I want right now.
I’m writing this as a wake-up call to myself, and a reminder for anyone else who might need it.
I’ve read a lot about how depression and anxiety like to manifest themselves in more ways than one. It’s not just about crying fits or panic attacks– it can also show in more subtle expressions. One of these expressions is a scatterbrain mentality and a lack of motivation. By no means am I self-diagnosing myself here– my purpose for pointing this out is just to illustrate how internal conflict reveals itself externally too.
Taking a look around my surroundings, I already feel exhausted by what I see. My work table is cluttered with miscellaneous items from both last school year and this one. I have jewelry strewn about the surface, stray articles of clothing from night’s I’m too exhausted to shed off my attire in my bedroom draped across chairs, and loose papers collecting dust in their piles. As we speak, I have an unfurled paper bag from McDonald’s that’s threatening to spill out its contents and reveal my unhealthy eating habits to everyone.
My bedroom isn’t any better. In fact, looking at my bedroom upsets me the most. My “inspiration” desk is buried by a heap of clothing– a mix of used and soiled– I couldn’t find the energy to keep away in my closet. The closet itself is a mess of hastily shoved clothing and mismatched socks. My make-up desk is nearly unrecognizable underneath the scattered piles of cosmetics and skincare, dangerously close to the dirty clothing I also threw on over there in an attempt to keep away from Presley. My bed is a whole other animal, so I won’t even try to describe that.
My room’s a mess, and as much as I don’t want to be dramatic, it sure does feel like my life is a mess too.
As I’m typing this, I’m getting ready to take a 15 minute nap in hopes of restoring my balance. There is no happy or positive ending to this post, because I want to give you a raw glimpse at what burnout really looks like.
The next time I post, it will hopefully be an update of my successful effort to clean everything up.
Aside from my massive amount of things to tidy up, I also have a shamefully long list of pending blog posts that I need to both edit and start. I’ve experienced so many fun things since my last post, yet I’ve failed to produce any content for any of them.
It’s the last day of September, and as I welcome my birth month, I want to leave behind the heaviness 18 year old Fran has been heaving around for a while now.
Here’s to light and hoping I can become that for myself soon.