painted dreams.

There are quite a lot of people who are on study leave and have finals coming up right now. It’s that time again when a semester is ending and people start hating on final exams or submissions. It’s understandable, high school and college students are under stress.I don’t hate this time of the year. I won’t say I’m not completely bothered by the fact that I have less time for my hobbies though. But the only time I’d hate study leave or preparing for finals is if I were doing something I didn’t love.

I hear people around me saying they want to be doctors, engineers, designers, lawyers… they talk about how much they want a career and what they aspire to be. I don’t hear many of them talking about the process though. They love what they want to do but I’m not so sure they love the means of getting there. I used to be like that too, but due to events in my life that encouraged me to try to enjoy the present; I’m not anymore.

I started to make the most of my days, telling myself that I should love spending hours studying because I love learning and telling myself that I’m privileged to have this education. People look at me weird when it’s summer and I say I’m nostalgic for my late-night study sessions. It’s true though, I’m happy learning about a disease then linking it to some concept in physiology I know. I get excited when I guess clinical correlations while I’m studying anatomy. I’ll raise my hand up and cheer for myself! 

Amidst the stress of trying to get to where you want to be, and worrying about the consequences if you don’t; you sometimes start to feel like studying or working for something is a chore. Our view of stress could also make us burn out. Being a person whose had a lot of anxiety, I can say from experience that stress is sometimes inevitable but is always manageable. I listened to a TED talk about this and it brought about this paradigm shift that helped me a lot. I think people should start utilizing stress, turning it into motivation and letting it drive them.

Moral of the story: don’t let stress make you hate the process of getting to where you want to be. Fitness fanatics are always saying things like “it doesn’t get easier, you just get stronger” or “fall in love with the process” and I think this applies to much more in life. In life, we count the results as the accomplishments but we don’t always treat every step of the way as an accomplishment. We’re so preoccupied by the results that we stress ourselves out during the process.

If you woke up today and studied something, that’s an accomplishment. If you made an outline for that essay, it’s an accomplishment. If you enriched your mind in some way, it’s an accomplishment. So be happy about that! Be proud! Love your dream job and what it takes for you to get it.

it’s a nice day for it, i said. a pumpkin cocoa kind of day. 

you rolled your eyes. just hurry up, you said, i’m tired.

it’s just, i said. but i couldn’t get any further because i realized the world isn’t as romantic as i want it to be. that where i saw lipstick reds and passion oranges you just saw leaves. 

it’s just what? you sighed, what is it this time?