No need to hurry

I wrote this as a reminder that I should not dwell on stressful things too much. I am seriously getting prematurely gray.

As I look out the window on a rainy Monday morning, I start to contemplate on the life ahead of me. It's the classic Robert Frost two-roads-diverged-in-a-yellow-wood kind of stuff. After graduating, I am just so lost! Time and age have always been sources of stress for me. This has been the very reason that I stopped celebrating my birthday since I was seventeen. It is devastating that I am about to join the world of adults as I lose the 'teen' after the number as I tell my age. I hate the idea that I am getting closer to being twenty every freaking second. I know that many would think that age is just a number or twenty is fairly young to have a 'mid-life' crisis, but it worries me deeply because I feel like I have not done anything significant yet. The past few years have been difficult. They made me into a robot that acts if commanded. I never did anything out of my own will. Maybe, just maybe, I am in this stage of identity vs. identity crisis, I don't know. Then again, this very moment right here, staring outside the city enveloped by clouds and light drizzle, listening to wonderful music, I realized there is no need to hurry. As cheesy as it sounds, happiness is indeed a journey, not a destination.

I remember back in high school when I would be as light as a feather when I go to school. I felt like floating on air simply because I paid attention to what I liked, not what others liked for me. As I went with the flow, I made significant contributions to my academic activities, my extra-curricular activities, and my social activities. I forgot how it felt to have no time to spare, yet to have enjoyed every busy minute, every meaningful phone call, text message or e-mail, every person, every success, every failure. The tears, the sweat, heck even the blood, they were not wasted because I lived. I lived for my own good. I lived to enjoy and celebrate life as it was in that moment. So after all the wasted time of living in the shadows of the expectations, I just realized that expectations are just hindrances that stopped me from achieving my full potential instead of goals that should have helped me improve my life. An expectation is an extremely heavy baggage to carry. It is a burden that I carried for the past three years. I let it overpower me. I lived by it, never thinking outside it.

As it dawned on me in this blog entry, I am flattered that people think highly of my capabilities, but from now on, the only expectation that I choose to carry is my own, and guess what? The only expectation I have of myself is to be that young lady in high school but older and definitely wiser. Hence, if I fail to do so, I have this entry to remind me that there is no need to hurry.