I Postponed My Goal, And Maybe You Should Too

Hi! It’s been a minute, hasn’t it?

Before going further, firstly, let me wish you a very Merry Christmas 🎄 (wherever you are in the world and whether you celebrate it or not) and happy holidays.

It truly has been a while since I last posted anything here. My insecurities, although I have been getting better at controlling and filtering them, still managed to find the nooks and crannies of my brain and deposit some self-doubting seeds. Crippling my confidence into thinking that I wasn’t committed or passionate enough to maintain this blog, I doubted if I sincerely wanted to continue and whether I was capable of it.

Tracing back to how this blog came about, it was a lengthy brainstorming session. Truth be told, I had an idea of having this platform a little over two years ago. (Yup...I really took my sweet time there.)

That year, I was so determined to have something for you to see, something like this. But I can assure you if I had produced anything that time, I wouldn’t have felt half as proud as I am with the outcome I have today.

Just a random chill day at the park.

I played around with some concepts and tested a few things to see if they would work for the vision I had in mind. They didn’t. It was frustrating because I remember feeling so eager to create, yet that excitement actually stemmed from the anxiety of not doing anything meaningful with my life.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to just put something out there without a well-rounded plan. Coincidentally, work began to come in high-frequency waves.

With overloaded projects, a 3-hour daily commute, working overtime, and taking care of myself, I did not want to bite off more than I can chew.

So, I decided to take a step back and put a hold on this blog idea.

For the next 16 months that I was working my big girl job, this idea kept haunting me but I couldn’t pick up where I left off. Believe me, it wasn’t because of my lack of trying to put things in motion or even dedication. And I know this may sound like a cliché excuse, but life did get in the way.

It didn’t occur to me until early 2022, that life simply has a funny way (sometimes not so much) to redirect you to achieve your goals by not letting you make a move.

The way I see it is, I was given the opportunity to learn (or unlearn) something that would be essential to attain my goal.

More often than realized, we set goals and struggle to accomplish them, because there are steps that we might have overlooked.

In my case, I knew I wanted to create a blog and fill it with my writings, but what would it be? Even some fundamental questions such as what topics I would cover and how I would organize my content were unanswered, initially.

Fast forward to me writing this blog post, I found myself in a similar position as I was two years ago.

Early this year when I had the opportunity to just sit, be with myself and my own thoughts, and reflect on my life, some of the misconceptions I had from my early 20s (particularly about becoming an adult and how an adult should get their things together) got debunked.

(Turns out we—or at least I—have been fed way too much outdated social norms and unnecessary peer pressure, yikes...🤯)

One of the most important revelations that I learned is that getting things done as an adult does not only mean improving your time management skill so that the boxes on your goal checklist can get ticked as soon as possible. What needs to come beforehand is ✨prioritizing✨. Knowing what’s important for you and what should come before anything else so you can dedicate the appropriate effort and time to succeed.

And perhaps you’ve figured this out or maybe you haven’t, either way, there’s a degree of sacrifice that comes with prioritizing. Manifesting dreams or goals come with a cost, and sometimes, that cost is one (if not more) of your other dreams.

This is me writing content for this post.

As I already mentioned before, life happens, and life is happening to me right now, which means that I have to, once again, take a step back.

This is far from a permanent sacrifice. It’s merely a deferment, like putting a really great novel back on the shelf because you need to read a textbook to prepare for an exam.

A self-affirmation/mindset shift that I have been practicing lately is telling myself this:

"If I am feeling overwhelmed by the things that I should, want, and can do, that means I am not prioritizing correctly."

Whenever I feel like I'm suffocating or drowning from all my responsibilities and self-deprecating thoughts start to infiltrate my mind, I would find a comfortable surface to sit on, breathe, and tell myself that sentence. Then, I would make a list and sort my priorities (I LOVE making lists and I think it is possible that I feel more satisfied finishing the list compared to completing the actual task itself).

Understand that pausing isn’t the same as quitting, as long as you go back to pick up where you left off. As someone who has a tendency to beat themselves up for not doing well at something, I wished someone had told me this when I was in my early 20s.

---

This is officially my last blog post in 2022 and as we are approaching the end of an amazing chapter to embark on a new one, I wish you a very happy new year! May 2023 bring you enlightenment, show you the pathways, and offer you the opportunities that you need to achieve your dreams and goals.

Let’s start the new year with a brand new mindset and I hope you figure out what your absolute priorities are for the next twelve months.

Cheers to making things happen🥂