Doing your own thing feels so weird sometimes.
For a while now I’ve felt behind my peers. Nothing I’ve really done has ever been consistent with what people my age do, and this summer is no different.
People my age, in the late teens and early 20s, are out here getting internships, jobs, going on vacation to their fancy vacation house or travelling to a scenic European or Caribbean country and hang out with their legions of friends.
This summer, things have not gone as planned for me. A number of things irrelevant to this story went wrong or didn’t happen, but the main thing to note is that it seriously sent me through a — and I am hesitant to use this word — depressive period where I frankly could not be bothered to be productive.
A slight social media addict, I check my socials every day. I look at Instagram stories, check Snap Chat, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube… the list goes on. I usually enjoy doing these things because I like to see what my friends and celebs are up to, but I found it this time around to be pretty damning. I looked at my friends and acquaintances hanging out with each other, posting photos of their airplane window seat on their flight to Italy, seeing them complain about their trashy minimum wage job, or reading about their day-to-day internship updates.
All this while I was curled up in my bed, eyes glued to my laptop, too drained by my own thoughts to actually be able to pick myself up and do something. The fact that I wasn’t doing any of the things my peers were doing only exacerbated this feeling, and the cycle continued. I knew deep down not to compare, not to care about their happenings because after all, we all are living our own individual lives. I knew that they were completely valid to hate their jobs or go on fun vacations. I also knew that they all have their own set of problems that they dealt with offline.
The biggest kicker for me was that despite knowing this, I couldn’t help but feel that something was wrong with me. That I was just constantly down on my luck, feeling all the negative feels.
I’m out of this dull period now, finding comfort in things younger me enjoyed as I heal. I find myself listening to music I loved in middle and early high school, watching comfort shows like Gilmore Girls, just taking care of myself on every level possible. In the back of my mind, I fight thoughts of still feeling lazy, unproductive, and behind others.
Every time I feel this way, I remind myself of how okay it is that I feel all these things. What the heck do I consider to be unproductive, anyway? Cause repairing a month worth of sadness and stress sure sounds like a lot of work, and I’d be self-sabotaging myself so hard if I didn’t give myself even the least bit of credit for the genuine work I did to build myself back up.
I’m not sure where all of this storytelling was going, but I’m sure someone else out there is also going through or went through a similar thing to me somehow. If you’re reading this and you’ve read it thinking “dang, I kinda understand what this girl is going on about” then I hope you’re okay and I’m proud of you.
Doing your own thing, accepting, and being comfortable with the fact that you’re seemingly doing things differently from the people around you and moving at your own pace is hard and scary to acknowledge sometimes. But we can and always end up doing hard things.
Thank you so much for reading my lil random thoughts as my summer comes to a close! If you want to read more of my lil random thoughts check out some of the stories linked down below! :)
