Think back to your senior year of high school. We were totally solid in who we were only for that to be wiped away by graduating and entering college. We were just a speck of dirt in a large wind of university. In high school, you thought you were at the top, having great grades, being socially connected, having just the right amount of freedom. Little did we know that we were barely breaking ground on the "house of life."
Back in the day, you would fall down, pick yourself up, and keep going. In today's generation, falling down is always publicized over social media. The anxieties build up as you think of the fact that if you mess up everyone will know and kick you while you are down. In return, you try to stabilize your foundation in a variety of ways, one of them is exploring and trying new things. Yet over this time of stabilization, you try to avoid making mistakes at any costs because you are an "adult" now and you shouldn't be messing up as you did only a few years ago. The continuous thoughts of thinking that if you mess up you are done for swirl around your developing mind.
The first thing you need to remember is that your foundation needs to be solid.
This foundation consists of who you are, and you won't be able to build upon the rest of your life without the sturdy groundwork of knowing who you are. Remind yourself every day that it's okay to not be the best, it's okay to be the middle, to be average. Validation should come from yourself not from the success you put up around you. Help lay your foundation with people who are there to help you unconditionally. Respect the people who take the weight off of your shoulders and put it on theirs without hesitation and without needing something in return.
Your inner circle should be full of people you can be open to. If you can't come out and say that you messed up, you need to find new people who don't make you feel ashamed of your mistakes. Don't keep your anxiety and failures bottled up from your circle because you will end up spilling all your emotions and you won't be able to stop it.
Before you even have a say in the matter the base layer of your foundation of life is also already laid out for you by your parents and upbringing. While you don't have any say in how you were brought up, you do have a say in how you come out of it. Parenting is something that you don't have control of but something that you should be aware of. There are multiple types of parenting, and it's important to see which types help you, and types that don't for that base layer of your life.
Parents who just put you on the highest step without teaching you how to climb up by yourself are just as bad and setting you up for failure, as parents who expect you to climb without falling down every once in a while. Your parents should be there to spot you and help out. They aren't there to build everything up for you.
At the end of the day, the foundation for the rest of your life comes from within. You make it the best you can, with what you have been given. Success is a reflection on hard work put into what got you there, and your foundation needs to be solid within yourself before you can begin to build upon it throughout the rest of your life.
