Have you ever - thanked yourself

I don't know where to start. It is 3am and i suddenly woke up in the middle of the night and feel like my life is about to change again. Partly because of aging. Here i am, thought about a blog i left behind years ago. Found a post in 2022 unpublished which i probably didn't have the courage or time to complete it. Stumbled upon my last post in October 9, 2020, and then i realised that was easily six years ago. I was 26 and now i don't keep track of my age anymore. Revisiting the words i left six years ago made me realise how much things have changed, and how much i have been through, and how much i have changed. I just want to thank myself for once.

So, what happened after October 9, 2020. I remember vividly that I left my EY corporate job by the end of February 2021 and officially became self-employed. I didn't have things figured out at all. What I knew was that I needed to go through pain and struggle today for some victory tomorrow. That's always been the rule of life I hang on to. For a year, I worked 365 days a week, 7 days a week. I went from drawing a decent salary to absolutely nothing. Stripped of my glamorous title, living on my savings, holding my breath, hiding my feelings, and constantly living on the edge, just hoping I would get somewhere.

True enough, I did get somewhere, somewhere in an empty parking lot in the middle of the night, crying and wondering what went wrong. I don't think I have ever cried so much in that one year as in the rest of my life so far. That year had to be one of the worst times of my life. In a nutshell, I didn't respect myself enough to walk away from a toxic environment, thinking that was the price I had to pay for the journey I had signed up for. In exactly one year, I was back to zero again ,or probably worse than I was a year ago when I left my corporate job.

At 27, I was left discouraged, confused, embarrassed, humiliated, broke, and very much wanting to give up. I was prepared to give up everything and just walk away, until things took an unexpected turn.

God finally sent me somebody and gave me a hand. I am not a religious person, but I do believe in the power of God. I believe God was probably thinking He had to stop messing with me, or I would probably die. And yes, I did feel like I was dying at that point in time. I thank God, and everyone who was there for me and with me, sincerely. And here I am now, realizing I have not thanked myself enough. Thank you for holding on. Thank you for not giving up. Thank you for the courage to walk away and start over again.

It has been almost five years since I decided to pick myself up and try again. I am not where I want to be yet, but I am certainly not where I used to be. You probably thought I have now figured things out, but I never did, and I still do not know. I guess it is about making progress, the kind of progress that is sometimes so insignificant you wonder if it even counts as progress at all. But it adds up, and one day it will be the foundation of a breakthrough. Progress is a choice. It is a daily choice you make.

Five years. I have had a lot of new experiences and met many new people. It is so hard to put into words. They all changed me. My priorities have shifted, and my perspective has also changed. Yet coming back to the things I wrote before, I still feel like I am the same person.