To anyone reflecting on their old self, I hope you know that you are worth it. I hope you realize that you shouldn't ever feel sorry for any of the mistakes your old self might have made. There comes a time when even the leaves fall from the trees and change colors too. Maybe it was time for yourself to change "colors" into something more bigger and brighter. I hope you wake up everyday feeling like cloud nine, because that's what you are. Well, these are a couple of things I tried to remind myself about, given how I have changed the past months in quarantine. I guess you could say the last couple of months were my metamorphosis stage, where I was in a shell to become a butterfly that would break free from my past self.
It's not that I necessarily hate my past self. It's just, there needed to be some kind of change. A change that would evoke the real me to come out of the shell and fly away into the air with the other butterflies. It's funny, because this happened during quarantine (when everyone was in lockdown mode and not leaving their homes and staying situated instead), which was also my "metamorphosis" stage. The thing about change though, is that it happens when the time is right. You can never force it or stop it. It is kind of like taking an eraser and just erasing the last couple of lines or even a paragraph you might have written and trying to start with a blank slate of paper.
The world we live in today has so many expectations of us. We are told that we have to be "pretty", "skinny", "smart", "funny", "athletic", "tall", "rich", to name a few. But the thing is, these are somewhat shallow expectations that we are told to fulfill. Being a member of society goes far beyond these external things. That seems to be the problem with this world and the society we live in, in general. They expect things from us, when they don't really even know us or where we have been. It's funny to say that they can also still expect these things from us, even when we still haven't found our true selves yet.
Fortunately, this quarantine gave me a good amount of time to try to plot a way to break free from society's expectations. I took a small hiatus on Instagram and Facebook, I decided to take on personal training, I changed my whole daily routine. Now, all of these may sound very simple, but in reality it was quite a shift. The worst part of change is when you have to begin to learn how to adjust to it. Most of us fear change or even, ignore change altogether. Change often feels so foreign that we may try to run away from it when we start to see it coming. But that's also when the metamorphosis stage gets delayed and it ends up taking an even longer time to break free from the shell and fly away from the frivolous things society wants from us.
I am an advocate for change in oneself and I am proud of it. If it wasn't for change, I wouldn't have been able to find myself in this world and learned how to appreciate myself more. This goes out for anyone who has struggled with self-love and acceptance. Change can be a good thing.
