I woke up finding multiple reasons to be annoyed on the very last day of 2017. My mom left her alarm on and disturbed my sleep; when I gave up sleeping and checked my phone instead, I did not see a message I was expecting… just to name a couple. These triggered an onslaught of negative thoughts, more reasons to feel discontent.

I was ready to have a bad end to this year, but then I surprised myself.

I made the mental switch to turn this day into a good one. I promptly got out of bed, washed my face, turned on uplifting music, and got in the zone to write this blog post.

As I wrote this, I was overwhelmed with pride of how differently the day turned out compared to how it would have if it had happened the beginning of this year. I got even more pleasantly surprised; pride wasn’t a feeling that I experienced often.

Then, I realized another thing: learning to be proud of myself has been an overarching theme of my 2017.

Pride doesn’t come naturally to me, thanks to my long-standing affliction of the impostor syndrome. I will write more on this subject in another post, but in short it means that I am “unable to internalize and accept my success”, attributing it to luck instead of ability. It corrodes my sense of self worth and deprives me of the ability to feel pride.

To end 2017, therefore, I wanted to take note of my three proudest moments this year and reflected on what they meant to me.

1. I can drive (a manual, at that) and speak basic Korean

I have criticized myself for a lot of things; one that I’ve become well acquainted with is that I had no discipline. “Whatever you pick up you’ll give up sooner or later,” I’d tell myself. “You don’t have the necessary ingredient for success in you.”

Case in point: I took my first driving lesson when I was in high school. I never really stuck to it, though, having only impromptu practice sessions about once every two years. It is no wonder that almost a decade after, I still couldn’t drive a single car.

Similarly, I have always loved learning languages and wanted to learn one from East Asia. I decided on Korean because I loved the alphabets and the sound of the language. I got the hang of the alphabets in my second year of high school, but never really committed to being a fluent user of the language. That means, I could read words written in Korean alphabets, but not necessarily understand what they meant.

This year, I set a goal to master both driving and Korean. I enrolled myself in regular classes, trying my best to keep up with the lessons despite my busy work schedule. It wasn’t easy, and I didn’t always succeed. Regardless, I persisted.

I’m proud to say that I can now drive a manual car and have pocketed a driver’s license. I also began to see improvements on the Korean language front. After the first few months, for instance, I could understand tweets in Korean that I used to need Google Translate for. My proudest moment, however, is when I travelled to Korea with my friend a few weeks ago. Throughout the trip, I could hold my end in basic conversations with the locals, and comprehend public announcements at the metro station or on the bus. I could even do some live translation for my friend during a broadcast by our favorite group, BTS.

I proved my inner critics wrong and I’m proud of myself for that.

2. I’ve become myself more at work, but with skills  

The drawback of having the impostor syndrome is, I often feel there’s a certain illusion I need to keep up so that people won’t see through my “incompetence”.

This tendency was at a record high during the period of my “quarter-life crisis”. I would try to balance multiple, sometimes conflicting, masks to keep everyone happy — an empathetic co-worker, a stern supervisor, a polished professional — while fighting to keep the “truth” out of sight. The truth is, I was an imperfect being, still unsure of my place in the middle of it all.

One of the suggestions that my boss gave me in response was to “be myself more, but with skills”.

It took me a while to figure this out. The key was, I realized, to hone not only the technical side of my skill set, but also the other, more subtle side. It involved a lot of self reflection and self disclosure. It required being brave enough to be vulnerable in front of the very people I fear would find out I was a “fraud”. To show them the flawed side to my whole being, and embrace it.

If you knew me at all, you’d know how terrifying that prospect was to me. I believed, however, that I needed it. That it would help both myself and those I am responsible for to grow. So, I did it.

One of the most encouraging signs that I was on the right track was when a colleague, who wasn’t very close to me at the beginning, caught me silly-dancing at work. She said, “It’s good to see this side of you. The goofy one. I used to think of you only as this perfect professional. Though I was always in awe of that Marsha, I love to see that you’re just a human too.”

This year in my professional life, I have grown to be more comfortable with the role I play, the expectations assigned to me, and, at the same time, the notion that I am still a “work-in-progress”. It feels great to make a crack on the illusion that, because of my title, I have to be perfect all the time.

It took great effort to get there, and I am proud of how far I’ve come since the day I first joined the company, or the worst days of my quarter-life crisis.

3. I’m in a much better headspace 

I started this year with a very bleak outlook on life and on myself. I was numb most of the time from all the negativity I wrought inside my head.

“You’ll fail. You don’t have what it takes. There will always be people better than you. When people realize who you really are, they’ll leave you for nothing. People don’t even like you right now.” 

“You’re ugly. Your hair is too thin. Your nose bridge could’ve been higher. You don’t have the right body proportion. You’re fat.” 

“You’re lazy. You’re not that good. You did this wrong. How could you make such a stupid mistake? Why are you such a slow learner?”  

“You’re selfish. You’re not genuinely kind. You only did that to gain something for yourself.”  

On and on, I would tell myself all these things, to the point where I actually believed them. One day, however, though I don’t exactly know what triggered it, I began to be a more detached observer of what was going on inside my head.

The observer noticed, for instance, that whenever I felt more strongly about nobody liking me, I would get my menstrual period not long after. So, the next time similar thoughts and feelings came back, the observer would tell me an alternative explanation to why I thought and felt that way: it was my brain on PMS!

The more I examined my thoughts and feelings, the more aware I became of the toxic ones. I made a habit of noticing when I told myself something negative, processing why I did so and whether there was any evidence to support its validity. I learnt to ignore rather than listen to them.

It certainly didn’t happen overnight. My brain has grown so accustomed to generating negative thoughts and staying down because of them, that I needed to be persistent to reverse it.

All throughout 2017, I’ve done everything I could to stay committed to making my new habit stick. Just like what I did when I woke up this morning.

In the past couple of years alone, I’ve faced so many things, including my own brain, that threw me down. Again and again, I would bounce back — even if it took every ounce of my strength. I’m proud, therefore, of this quality of mine that I’d like to call the “bouncy ball”.

And, you know what? That’s not a bad quality to have.

Not bad at all.

 

Credits:

Photographs from Stocksnap and Pixabay