If you dig your roots into anyone else but yourself, you will be nourished by dirt. Dig your roots into yourself for you are soil.
it was when I stopped searching for home within others / and lifted the foundations of home within myself / i found there were no roots more intimate / than those between a mind and body that decided to be whole - Rupi Kaur
The only person you need to impress is yourself.
Here's an example. I am currently involved in a program in France where I am an english teaching assistant. I graduated from university last year, class of 2020! In the fall, I traveled to France to Héricourt a small town 45 minutes from Switzerland and Germany. I live in a town a little bigger and take an 8 minute train to work. By living in a bigger town, I found a roommate apartment which is beyond awesome because I live with native french speakers. My language skills have skyrocketed because I am practicing constantly, early in the morning sometimes in the middle of the night. When learning a language, subconsciousness we assign purpose and outcome to the places we visit on a daily basis. A simple example would be a school that when approchaing the school you know learing will (hopefully) take place and when leaving you have come to understand that the learning for the day is done. It is the notion of mental assignment gives power to these institutions that has is strongly rooted in our own minds and therefore our experience of events. If you have assigned the words dull, boring, and nausiating to your place of employment than to have a day that is not dull, boring, and\or nausiating will suddenly be a difficult task. The point here is to set ourselves up for success. Starting with the internal. The mental space. Changing associations will do for your life like opening windows will do for a room.
So with that, i want to say that having native french speakers makes my language learning experience more well rounded because I dont have to work for it. Speaking french is their natural state which turns them into teachers for me. The education that I have crafted my current state of life to render is my responsibility. And I can tell you that I am most proud of my life when I am the driver. But the perspective from which I look at my life is also something I craft. Moreover, I might craft it in a way, to make it look better than it does. And maybe these perspectives are crafted purely for others so that when I show them the view from up there, it is their approval and validating oooos and ahhhhs I wait for that let me know whether or not I am doing alright.
This is what I am talking about here. The notion of waiting for someone else to give you the green for go is as ineffective as waiting for a plant to grow in the dark with no water. All this waiting soon enough will seem normal because habits become the everyday building blocks of our lives.
Grounding this concept back in the reality of experience, TAPIF the teaching assistant program can be done for a second year. I have constructed various arguments for supporting why this program a second year would be a valuable use of time and money and not a waste. But at the end of the day, the only person that needs to be convinced of its value is me. On some level, making my parents and my closest friends get on board with the idea and in support of the arguments is one way that I can further validate my own support.
Lately, I've been reading the book You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life by Jen Sincero. She advises, well, many things but in particular to this post she writes "Our greatest fears are the greatest waste of time" (173). Meaning all this time we obsess over what we hope doesn't happen, trying everything to make sure it never comes true is truly the opposite of a use of time; a waste. Choosing fear is choosing to face what someone else thinks because it's safer than knowing what you think of yourself or about something you produced chose. If someone else thinks it sucks it's easy to just tell them they're wrong or prove them wrong but when you ask yourself and turn towards the inner critique, the reality of an answer like it sucks is so much more painful because there's no where else to turn.
So if it hurts that much why do it!?
Because it's the only way to live a life that ordinarily we would say only exists in dreams. A life led by someone who does exactly what they want. That person we dream of being, the one who will just start the project in spite of the fear that tells her not to start because it might be bad. Pain isn't a wall. It's not something to stop you in your tracks. Pain is but a storm; something but which to go through, to live, to experience. The pain of reality might strike like lightning, sound like thunder or get you wet like you went swimming a million times over but it will always leave the sky clearer than it found it.
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