No one, I mean absolutely no one has everything figured out even when they appear as they do. Life is a series of ups and downs, and we all have moments that we reach rock bottom, and that is fine, so long we try to pick up ourselves after that. There is a pressure on us to achieve certain things at a certain point in our lives, and when we don’t, we start to think that there is something wrong with us and that is why our life isn’t going as planned.
If we exist in this universe to get everything we want, whenever and however we want it, then we won’t learn anything. There is no light without darkness; we can never truly know the value of what we have if the world keeps handing it over to us when we need it. Failure teaches us how to be successful; the most successful people have usually failed more than they can count.
Rejections can be heartbreaking, but they are necessary for our growth and development, and unless we learn to see the blessing in such situations, we will always just be complaining about what life has not given us instead of focusing on what it has given us.
There is no guarantee that you will have everything figured out in your twenties, and there is a lot of pressure in the twenties. People expect you to graduate and have a stable job and probably get married and is ready to start a family and that expectation will make you feel like a failure when you clock twenty-five and you don’t achieve these goals especially when there are people around you having their lives figured out at twenty-two and twenty-three. But when this happens, do well to remember that there is no deadline for happiness or success.
There is no deadline for getting married or falling in love and starting a family, and that is fine. We all have different timelines; some people bloom early in life and others late. Some people have these things handed to them because of their social background or any other privilege. Life has never been fair, and you can’t force it to be.
There is no guarantee that getting a job at twenty-two or getting married at twenty-three or twenty-five will make you happy and give meaning to your life. Maybe you just need to try a little harder before things fall into place, perhaps the universe has other plans for you or you are not the person you need to be before you achieve all those things that you feel you have to achieve.
People find love at fifty and enjoy it for the rest of their lives; people have kids in their late thirties or their early forties. People become successful in their early seventies and late sixties and even much later on in their lives. If we are meant to move together, then we will probably have the same timelines, and we will perhaps learn nothing.
You have two choices in life, either you let the rejections beat you down and stop you from trying, or you see a stepping stone to success in it, and you work harder next time while trying to enjoy the little things. It is a fact, that trying to pick up yourself and still remain motivated after a terrible rejection is easier said than done and can be extremely difficult and you might feel like giving up sometimes, but don’t.
Understanding this is not even about the possibility that the people that appear to have it all are unhappy deep down, or their lives are secretly a mess. This is about you as an individual and how you perceive yourself based on the things you haven’t figured out; it is about learning and understanding that things may not always work out, and you will not still have things figured out, and you may not be able to beat the deadline you set for yourself or the deadline that society sets for you.
Knowing that things are not going smoothly in your life and accepting that rejections will always come, and it’s very empowering. It’s empowering because you have learnt to accept the things that are set to discourage or break you and instead of them being weaknesses to you, they become strengths, and no one can use it against you.
This issue is all about striking a balance and not getting comfortable with failing because getting comfortable with failing is where the problem is; it is just as destructive as beating up yourself for things that are beyond your control. Striking a balance also means that as much as you believe you can’t control the outcome of everything in your life, you also have to understand that there are many things you can control and you should attempt to control.
For instance, you can’t control whether a company will grant you your dream job, or your perfect partner will agree to start a relationship with you, but you can control your character and behaviour and become the person worthy of such a job or such a person. You can’t refuse to put effort into getting good grades and character building and then go ahead to blame the people that refuse to tolerate your shortcomings because you think you can’t control anything in life.
Learn how to put in your best effort all the time, you never know who is watching or what life planned for you even when things don’t seem to be moving as smoothly as you expect it to. Life is about striking a balance and understanding that society may try to tell us when we should achieve a certain thing in life but we all move in different timelines and success as well as happiness does not come with an expiration date.
Stop comparing yourself with others and put in the work. Other people’s lives do not define you.
