When I finished my internship, I believed that I was going to laid job after job. That’s what my counselor’s had told me, they said after we finished our internships we would get offers. I had a double degree from Switzerland so what were the chances that I wouldn’t get an offer from a great company.

I applied to numerous international companies, I didn’t get a single response. I did however, get a response from a company in Denmark. I was proud of the cover letter I did because it involved baseball and success. The HR manager replied and said as much as he wanted to give me a job I didn’t know how to speak Dutch.

I was back where I started and I applied to more companies around the world. Didn’t get anything from it, I spent three years living on my parent’s couch. If I had least had something, I’d say it would make me feel better, but I had nothing. My friends all had jobs, but I didn’t have anything in my grasps. In that time I learned a lot more about myself than I did at university.

I’m not saying going to Switzerland was a waste of money, it was the best time I had in a while. I got to experience things I never would have, but here’s the thing despite going there my life didn’t radically improve. Businesses weren’t pounding on my door to offer me jobs. I learned that there was so much they refused to teach us and that made competing with other applicants difficult.

So, in the three years I learned a lot about myself and who I wanted to be. I wished I had learned this sooner, but sometimes we can’t get to the finish line before we understand certain things. And those build us up rather than push us down. At some point, in your life, you will learn the exact same lessons.

My experience isn’t anything unique, but because I felt like I had failed, I did a lot of self-reflection and I learned some important lessons along the way. Whatever you decide to do in your life, you need to understand we all go through the same ups and downs. We all lose friends. The way we thought the world would look like changes and we have to accept it. For me I had to accept that life didn’t owe me anything and I had to make a decision on who I wanted to be.

The lessons I learned in this blog post made me better because I learned vital lessons that pushed me out of my comfort zone. Maybe, if life hadn’t given me the kick I needed, I wouldn’t have learned these lessons. Possibly, I wouldn’t have improved or grown as a person. It is because of these lessons I learned what was important and what wasn’t. In the space of a few months, I learned things I didn’t think I needed and that is why I wrote this post. It is my hope, that you use this as a template to improve or change things you don’t like in your life. 

Life offers us many lessons, we just have to be willing to learn them. Here are a few lessons I learned;

You Can’t Force Things

I believe that everything happens because it needs to happen at the right time. We should embrace that and accept it. For so long, I forced myself to accept things that didn’t quite add up, it didn’t matter how miserable it made me feel. I thought I had to do to make other people happy.

I thought that’s what needed to be done. And so for years, I dragged my feet, accepted anything anyone told me and it was a difficult time. I had a friend who kept telling me how I didn’t know what I wanted and that I should just pick something.

I told her I wanted to be a writer and she rolled her eyes, mentioned something about being irrational. I’m saying this just to give you perspective because when you hit a hard place and you believe you’ll have people in your corner, sometimes you won’t. I didn’t have a lot of people in my corner in those days.

This was by far the hardest lesson I had to learn and one that you will eventually have to learn. It is natural to want things to happen the way you want them to. It is normal to expect that life will be exactly how you envisioned it, but you can’t force things. Whether it is relationships, job promotion, acceptance or anything else.

Also Read: How to Stop Perfection From Ruining Your Life?

I Discovered Who I Was

I thought I knew who I was, but it’s now I realize I didn’t. There are so many dreams I gave up because people told me and I did it. Why? I wanted more than anyone to make people happy even if I was miserable as a result of it. Discovering who I was has to be one of the most invaluable lessons I have learned.

When you learn how you are it is easier to make decisions and to set boundaries because you understand yourself better. Most of us taking self-discovery for advantage, but it is the best lesson you can learn no matter what age you are.

Granted, some of my dreams were out there, but nonetheless I sometimes wonder if I had pursued them where would I be now. At the end of the day, I can blame it on other people or myself. Truth is no one was pointing a gun in face, forcing me into a corner and yelling at me to decide.

It was all me. I didn’t have enough faith in myself to bet on me. If I was asked to bet on other people, I’d do that without batting an eyelid, but when it came to me I was hesitant. What I learned is that we need to take time to realize who we are, ask questions that no one dares to ask, risk what we believe to go after something else and to trust. That’s a mouthful, but those three years I realized what I wanted.

Fear Pushed Me Back

I have always wanted to be an author and have written enough books publish several in a year. I have been writing since I was thirteen. It’s in my blood, but I was afraid. 

So lost in what people said about me that I refused to believe in anything else. So life happened, found myself falling and there was nothing to pick me up. It took a while for it to sink in that fear has been a placeholder for me. I still struggle to wrap my head around it, but it explains so much of my indecisiveness. 

It explains why I have never pushed myself out there. I have always been hard on myself, but in a way when I was at college, I went out there. Then there was a year when I was at home because my parents couldn’t pay my school fees. That crushed parts of me. I was depressed for a while as fear shook me and made me irrational. Because of my ADHD I always believed that I’m playing catch up when it comes to finding my footing. That year my irrational fears came to light.

After I graduated I thought I would go far and that didn’t happen at all. The dreams and visions I had set for my life were destroyed in an instant moment. Nothing came to fruition and like a turtle I hid myself in my shell. Keeping myself from getting hurt, but that didn’t help me at all. Fear was one of the lessons I had to learn. I had allowed it for too long to push me back until I decided that I had enough.

Also Read: 15 Things You Should Stop Being Afraid of Right Now

Kept Seeking Validation

When your life isn’t what you wanted it to be. You will always seek validation and I did that. It was so bad I became friends with people who pushed me even further back.The first girl I befriended was dealing with her own issues, our friendship became toxic. The truth is she wasn’t the only toxic friend I had in my life. I had made it a habit of being friends with those kind of people.

I had hit a hard place, my life wasn’t the way I wanted it to be. For months I was depressed, I remember there was a day when I snapped, I was in the car with my mother and she kept asking me how I was. The crushing pain rolled over, I had a roof over my head, three square meals a day and a bed. In a way I was content, but there was a part of me lost in a sea of doubt.

My mother kept nudging and I let loose the pain I had been holding in. I cried, she parked the car and I told her how alone I felt. In the past, I was suicidal and a part of me in those years wanted to let go of everything. Once you think of killing yourself, like a rainstorm it keeps coming and when there’s a little bit of sunlight it lasts a second.

Validation is like that was well. We want people to accept us when we don’t love who we are. My mother always used to say to me you have to love yourself before you can love anyone else. The truth is I didn’t love who I was. I thought I was unlovable. A foolish notion that set in when I was ten years old. It took years for me to love me, follow my dreams and not what other people told me to do. The hardest lesson to learn is to stop waiting for validation. That is a battle you are likely never to win. One that will drive you insane if you try to.

In every moment displayed there has to be a time when you choose yourself over what anyone else thinks. That is the moment when strength sets in. So the question here is what did you learn from your painful moments? Write it down below.

                                                               KEEP  PUSHING

                                                                    VANESSA