3 Things I'm Leaving Behind in 2020

After the events of 2020, we all feel like we need a fresh start! Although 2021 looks at the moment to be setting itself up to be even stranger and out of control than last year, I’ve chosen to focus on the things in my life that I can control. Below are three ways of thinking that I am choosing to leave behind in 2020.

1. Making myself smaller for the comfort of other people.

We’ve all done it… Made ourselves smaller, quieter, less intimidating for the sake of another person. Perhaps we acted like we got a worse grading on a test than we actually did or talked about how rubbish the trip that we went on was. There is nothing inherently monstrous about this. In fact, we tend to do it because we empathise with our peers and would rather see them happy than potentially cause a moment of insecurity. On the flip side however, every time we do this, we are minimising our own struggles and accomplishments. There is nothing wrong with saying that we did well at something, just as admitting when we’re struggling is helpful to us and reminds others that we all go through hard times!

The problem comes when we find ourselves constantly toning down our personalities or downplaying our achievements because we either want to avoid a bad response from our peers or imagine on some level that we aren’t worth the things we have achieved. This is something that I have struggled with for quite a long time; most of which, probably stems from some sort of Imposter Syndrome. While I don’t think that any single person is worth more or less than anybody else and I can know intellectually that my achievements are a valid testament to the experience I’ve had and the skills I’ve taken the time to develop… sometimes I have trouble really believing it.

Over the course of my life, I’ve encountered many situations where I was made to feel small or cut down to size if I did get too excited about something that was happening in my life. There have been times when I’ve been treated like I was stupid or my skillset was mocked, times when my excitement about achievements were met with tense silences, and times when people made me feel like my personality was too much for them. I ended up subconsciously altering my behaviour because of this to fit into what I thought were other people’s idealised versions of me.

It got to a point recently, when I was working on one of my first professional projects outside of university, that I noticed how detrimental for me shrinking myself was. There I was, meeting new, interesting and likeminded people, who wanted to highlight everyone’s successes and share with me in what I was proud of, and I was majorly downplaying everything that I had done. It happened again one night when I was getting to know a new peer and I began speaking about a course that I had done at a prestigious institution. I had worked hard to get onto this course and had overcome quite a few obstacles to be able to do it. But I saw the irritation in their eyes, the stark change in the atmosphere, and I found myself instinctively backtracking. Instead, I began telling them how terrible it was and how little it had helped me. I watched the annoyance in their face clear, returning to the happy jovial state that it once was, and I relaxed.

When I realised what I had done that night, I was so ashamed of myself. I had already noticed that shrinking myself was a problem before this and had wanted to put a stop to it. From that night, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t ever do it again. Although it has taken many twists, turns and drawbacks, I finally feel in a position to seriously make some changes. I’m taking this knowledge with me into 2021 as something to work through and grow from.

2. Feeling as if I need to be useful in order to be treated as a human being.

Alongside the need to shrink myself, somewhere along the way, I seem to have internalised that my worth is equated with how much I can do for people. I don’t make a mental to-do list in my head of ways I can impress people, but if I care about you, I feel an almost compulsive need to show that by being as helpful as possible to you.

This sounds like a lovely quality to have on the surface but is one that has driven me mad with anxiety, especially at times when I felt that I had nothing to give. Adversely, I would feel guilty (almost, at times, to the point of inducing a panic attack) when people would offer to do things for me unless I could match it. Asking for anything was out of the question!

To put it into perspective, I was out with a previous partner of mine and he wanted to buy me lunch. This wasn’t much to him, but my thoughts were going haywire because I didn’t want him to feel like he had to spend his money on me. In that time, I tried to offer to pay for my own stuff, then to pay for something of his. When he refused this, I agonised over the menu to find the cheapest thing on it. In the end, I managed to wangle me paying for my own food, whilst he just bought me a drink.

This trait had been so deeply ingrained in me for such a long time that it took me a while to even realise I was doing it! I’d thought that was the way most people felt. It took me even longer to start making headway with these beliefs and begin to change them. Relationships of any kind should never feel transactional. If somebody only keeps you around for what you can do for them, and ghosts you when you cut the supply, those aren’t people with your best interests at heart.

I’ve only just started to feel as if I don’t always need to be productive or useful to be worthwhile. At times, I still falter and catch myself getting sucked into that unhelpful mental spiral… But I used to think that no matter how hard I tried it still seemed an impossible habit to get out of, and I’ve come this far. I’ve just got to keep putting the work in.

3. Holding back on, or never completing projects because they’re not absolutely perfect.

The perfectionists among us should be familiar with this one. This problem is one of the main causes of my procrastination. There have been so many projects… Books I’ve started writing, shows I’ve started making, essays I’ve needed to complete, articles I’ve needed to publish etc. etc… In the past, I’ve either held back on showing people my progress until the very last second or I’ve not completed the thing at all because I’ve convinced myself that it won’t be good enough down the road for me to expend all of my energy continuing it now.

This type of thinking is unhelpful for a number of reasons. One of them, being the obvious, if you never finish anything or put it out there then you will never know if it could have been great! Not only that, but when you put your work out there, you get to assess the feedback, learn, get to know what works, and grow from it. You gain a thicker skin and a deeper sense of confidence once you get passed the first hurdles. You might even realise that you don’t want to continue and your passion lies elsewhere, but you’ll never know unless you try.

The other reason that this type of thinking is unhelpful is that showing other people your progress on something that you’re working on can be an incredibly useful experience. Not all feedback is good or constructive (particularly if the thing you are working on requires a very niche skillset), but all feedback gives you an idea of the way your work is immediately perceived by outside eyes. This can leave you with some interesting questions to ask yourself about where you go from there.

In an educational setting, going to the tutorials your teacher puts up slots for and getting feedback from them on your work every step of the way opens up your eyes to the plethora of possibilities you have and the directions you can take your project in. It gives you incredibly valuable insight into the work which pushes you past the point you thought you were originally capable of!

Whilst I have gotten tons better and have seen the benefits firsthand of showing my work in its progression stages, I still have a long way to go with completing projects and putting them out there. It’s going to require me altering the way I think about myself, my work going forwards, and pushing myself out of my comfort zone, but I know the way I’ll change and grow because of this will be worth it!

We’re all going through a collective traumatic experience with this pandemic. It can be so easy to lose ourselves in this and spend our days mourning for what we have lost. Focusing on the things about our lives that we can control, however, maybe we can use this strange time to look inwards to ourselves and check on how we’re doing. What have we always wanted to do? Are we where we want to be? Do we feel happy? What do we think is missing from our lives and what are we going to do about it? These are important questions that we don’t often have the time to ask. Hopefully, when we come out of this experience we’ll know ourselves better. We’ll be kinder to ourselves and we’ll realise that it’s never too late to learn, grow, or change direction completely! Remember, when everything seems like too much, take baby steps. It's better late than never.