As you may know by reading my previous posts or looking at my profile, I'm 37, and only realised I was bisexual last year. I think that the coming to this understanding about myself was part of a whole process I am going through - learning to be honest with myself, accepting myself, understanding myself. For most of my life, I have had self esteem problems - stemming from issues in childhood which I may go into in later posts.. but let's just say, I have battled with depression for many years and haven't really thought I was the greatest person alive. I still don't think I'm the greatest person alive. But ... I've spent the last few months getting to know me. And I like me now. What I really want to talk about in this post is personal growth. I do believe that we are all on a journey, and that we go through life learning lessons, and (possibly) we die when we have no further lessons to learn. It's Spring in South Africa and this is probably why I'm on this wavelength at the moment. By "personal growth" I don't mean getting fat, or tall. I mean becoming a better person. (I put that in just to clarify the point but also to prove I do have a sense of humour.)
Life has knocks in store for all of us. It also has happiness, but it's the knocks that stop or hinder us from growing. And we can't let them - it's sort of our responsibility to ourselves, and to the world, to be our best selves, in spite of, or because of, the knocks. So the question is how do we do it? I think that like anything, we need to set ourselves personal goals and then set out to achieve them. Don't set yourself the goal of becoming the Queen of England if you're a young girl living in Australia. Ultimately, you may want to become the Queen of England, and that may well happen, but set bite size, chewable, achievable goals, and then do it. Start with honesty. Are you a really good friend, but better at practical support than you are with empathy, for example? And does it BOTHER you? If it bothers you, work on it. Pay attention to it, read up about it, fix it. And once you have achieved that, then determine the next thing to work on. Talking in front of crowds has always phased me, so I started a business forum and brought the people, and then had to speak in front of them. I was deadly nervous the first few times, and now, I'm not nervous of that anymore.
Striving for the best may be even more difficult for an LGBTI person than it is for a straight person. (I'm not sure - I've never been anything other than me, and I've always found it challenging). You may feel that putting yourself out there leaves you even more open to criticism. That is why, when you have got it right, the feeling of achievement could be so much more satisfying.
I began by making a list of the things I wanted to be better at, and slowly but surely I have started knocking things off the list. The list will never be finished, because as I go along, other things crop up into my mind and get placed onto it.
The other life lesson I wanted to share about is the following: As you get older and move through life, don't lose touch with the THINGS that you love. You get busier, more people come into your life, more people move out of your life, and slowly, if you allow yourself to lose touch with what you love, you die inside. If you love music, keep listening to it. If you love your art, for heavens sake don't give it up even when you have three children. The things we do as teenagers, the hobbies we create and the passions we find are the things we truly love, because as kids we do not worry about the world and what it expects of us - we are just concerned with what makes us feel good. If as a young adult and middle aged adult you lose touch with these things, eventually, you will start to lose touch with your soul, and a you who is out of touch with your soul is not a very nice person to be around and is not doing the people you are around any good.
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