This is a list of things that have happened to me this year:
- Stuck in a boot for three months trying to heal my foot from an injury suffered 2 years ago
- Minimal movement, almost never leaving the house for 2 years
- Poor diet (since I cannot move a lot, cooking was hard)
- Constant migraines, dizziness and hard time to focus
- Gained 15 kgs since the injury, January 2022
- Two years of ten different treatments for the injury have failed
- Foot rehabilitation, no walking for almost two months
- Appendicitis surgery on May 2nd 2022, the day before my flight (that obviously I did not take)
- Six weeks of no weight bearing
- Foot rehabilitation has to start from scratch because of appendicitis surgery
- Gained 5 more kgs
- Weight gain is making the already weak leg suffer more, rehabilitation is slower
- When I start feeling just 10% better, I lose my grandmother on August 2022
This list is incomplete, as I found myself on August 24th, 2022.
This is not a list that is trying to gain pity from the reader.
This is not a list that is trying to say I am the most demanding person in the world.
Probably, it means the opposite.
What do I mean by this title, you might ask? Well, I haven’t had a perfect life. I had my traumas and and unique experiences, but I have a family and a partner who loves and thawhomlove back with all I have. In my early college years, I got into the world of self-development with a clear goal: becoming someone who strives to become a better person (you could call it egotistical, or anything you want).
I wanted to be the 1% and, with that, make my hardworking immigrant parents retire as soon as possible, giving them the life they deserved.
Through reading different books, I felt something was missing. Thanks to my parents, I only had to worry about studying what I wanted. I had a comfortable life. But these fantastic people I am reading from had many struggles, hardships, and battles. And there, at that moment, I said:
I worked out, stayed in shape, read, took cold showers, and consumed videos and podcasts. I did all of that as if it was my second job (obviously, after studying). I got great grades, and I tried to help my classmates as much as I could. I was out of my comfort zone.
This year, right now, I learnt that what I considered to be out of my comfort zone was just myself feeding my ego. I am a spoiled and scared kid, who thought all those things made him braver or stronger. I did not have any specific goal in mind.
And then time passed. I kept running away from truly understanding why I was doing all those things. I kept failing to put myself on real discomfort. It’s a trend to ask ourselves to get out of our comfort zones, but it is harder to uncover what is real discomfort and what is just a lie to entertain ourselves.
Four years passed like the speed of light, and then I got hurt on my left. Ironically, I couldn’t run away more. I thought to myself, well this is perfect time for me. Hardship is here! Now I can get closer to them!
That didn’t happen as you probably are assuming. I did not improve much, actually I regressed. I was so used to running away that my amazing brain found new ways to do so. We are truly the ultimate adaptation machine (Tom Bilyeu).
Through this series of posts, I want to focus the three blocks of this story which are the sequel (myself running away from discomfort), the injury (the consequences of running away) and the aftermath (experiencing real hardship on 2022).
My main goal is not teaching you what hardship taught me, my objective is selfish, it is organizing my own thoughts and processing what I have been through, who I was, who I am and who do I want to become.
Maybe, through your reading, you are able to understand me, and even better, you can find something about yourself. You can empathize, you can criticize my actions and thoughts, anything that makes you look inside and choose your own path.
In the end, one of the main things I learnt (which I will dive through deeper in the next post) is that the development, growth, internal thoughts of each one of us is truly unique. It’s true that we can share many things in common such as values, hardships, tragedies, victories and bliss, but each one of us will process them differently.
Imagine you have your whole life broken into small legos, for example 80 pieces. Let’s say we all can pick from 100 pieces (which represent experiences in life). Each one of us will pick 80 lego pieces (through our life choices and consequences). Now, can you imagine how many possible unique combinations exist?
38360038805627158423173637987476768557382879954614887864982102519086400213229835056832484603595932502462923859608312217600000000000000000000
Let this sink in.
This means that even when we all share the same pieces our lives would still look completely different.
Through life, we look at those common pieces and we form communities with whom we feel identified and even sometimes we look at those who pick different ones and we choose to make them our enemies. I would love if you thought about this for a second:
