Clean Eyes

A couple of months ago, there was this ten year challenge going around on various social media, mostly Instagram and Facebook.  I remember looking through photos (and yes, I did post one just for fun) and thinking to myself that I literally look the exact same.  My hair was more or less the same length, color, and I was more or less happy to the same extent, at least upon first glance at the image.  But if you dug beneath the surface, Marie of 2009 and Marie of 2019 are very different.

Fourteen year old Marie had this mask on most of the time.  In public, I was always happy, helpful, and caring about the people around me.  But behind closed doors, I had many oh goodness gracious moments where I kept thinking to myself that my life couldn’t be the best it could get.  There had to be more to life than there was back then.  And I was completely and totally right: there was way more to life than I saw in 2009.

Over the last ten years, I finished high school, college, lived abroad, cut my hair short, came out, met plenty of amazing people, dabbled in various things on my path to figuring out what I really wanted to do with my life, learned French, learned Chinese, learned how to drive a car and a scooter, traveled to Europe, published two books, got five tattoos, and moved to the place I have always wanted to live.  I haven’t done everything by any means, but I have done a lot.  A whole lot that opened me up and exposed all my insecurities and brought into the spotlight.

I grew a crap ton over the last decade.  And honestly, that’s how it should be.  I believe it is our duty as conscious organisms on this planet to grow.  If we aren’t growing, what are we doing?

If we aren’t growing, we are eating the same food, every single day.  We are doing the same thing, every single day.  We are at the same job, year after year, complaining about the same lady adjacent to us who brings the smelliest lunch in the history of smelly lunches and spends two or three hours on personal calls when she could be doing her actual work, right?

If we aren’t growing, we don’t have room for happiness.  Without growth, we see the glass as half empty, always wondering when the other shoe will drop and we’ll have our worst fears confirmed, instead of realizing that our fears are just thoughts that we’ve allowed to have power over us.

No matter where we are in life, who we are, and what we are doing, we can always approach each and every day with clean eyes.  See the world for what it is, instead of what our thoughts or society tells us to see.  Take off the lenses that you have been taught to put on and see the potentialities.  Witness the elated moments that you always hear about but never see because you’ve had your blinders on.

Bid goodbye to your fears.  Literally.  Write them a goodbye letter or write them on paper and burn them.  Remind yourself every day that no matter how the day goes and how scared something makes you, you’ll do it.  There’s no try, just do it or don’t.  Don’t stay at the crappy job you hate because you make good money and it makes other people happy.  Do the things that make you happy, no matter how unconventional they are.

Embrace changes as they come and evoke change in your life.  Otherwise when 2029 comes around, you will wonder where the time has gone, as you sit at the desk and listen to your coworker complain on the phone adjacent to you.  It’s at that point in which you regretfully will realize that you are in the same exact place you were ten years ago: miserably stuck in mediocrity, when you were destined for so much more than you give yourself credit for.