We Will Always Be Lost and Found Again.
My life according to the Instagram posts I posted and stories I tell here may seem like to describe that I have everything sorted out. I am married to a loving husband, started our journey of living together abroad in Sweden while I study environmental management at one of the leading universities when it comes to the topic of sustainability. Yes, it may seem so but the truth is, none of us will have everything always sorted out — at least not everything, or not always.
It has been a month, probably, that I feel like a mess of a mess.
That is even messier than a mess. My sleep schedule changed during Ramadan and I am currently struggling to bring it back to my normal: 21h-04h. Not being able to have a good morning that starts with waking up early often ruins my mood for the day. I have gotten better at this at least by changing the mindset that “I only have a bad morning and not a bad day”. However, I cannot lie to myself that yes, my day may not be inherently bad, but days with me waking up early in the morning are always the better days. So, I am currently struggling.
Tiring days are also always the beginning of a bigger chaos. When I come home with 5% of my energy left inside of me, writing my journal has always been the hardest part of the day. I am fully aware that skipping this will lead to a bigger mess, but I keep on skipping it and I am on a bigger mess. This one, I have quite a hard time dealing with. Being pretty much a structured person, skipping a page means that I have to catch up with it before I write the entry of the next day. If I skip days instead of just a day, I have a lot to catch up and this often becomes a vicious cycle starting with having a lot to catch up, feeling lazy to relive the tiring feeling (I totally relive my day when I write my journal), but then feeling messy because I haven’t been able to pour out my thoughts and feelings for days. I will find myself easily tired of this, and happens that I can’t write. The vicious cycle continues on and on, and according to Mark Manson, the only way to cut the vicious cycle is by creating a short circuit.
My way of creating a short circuit is that I will skip pages for me to catch up later and I start to write in real-time again. I did this, and I have succeeded before, but now I am in that vicious cycle again amplified by my bad mornings. I now simply can’t even find the time to just write even a short entry. I feel like a bigger mess that is super messy. However, a constant debate is happening inside my head that yes, I may have not everything sorted out, but a baby step is still a step. When we were little, we did not even know how to walk. When we were in elementary school, we even struggled to do what back then seemed like super advanced math while it’s just multiplying and dividing. And that is part of growing up.
A moment of being lost, of not knowing, is part of growing up.
So for this moment, you may see that I am currently at a loss — and for now, I neither have everything figured out nor have always figured out my life. That is not simply just because I have a bad morning and have been not writing my diary for weeks. That is one part that makes my life a bit hard now, but I also have a lot that I haven’t figured out. I cannot really share in detail here, but I really hate uncertainties. It sucks for not being able to plan ahead because I am currently facing a lot of uncertainties. I know one day we will eventually figure this out — that when the day comes and we look back, we may simply say
“Oh you worry too much, you worrier”
That is because that’s just how life is. I am fully aware that I have always been in my best state for the past weeks, oh no, months even. I recall the last time I hit rock bottom was last year, probably around the same time as well, when I wanted to leave my job but I also had no hope of getting a master's degree. Oh right, my life sort of changed overnight: one night I cried because I hadn’t gotten a new job yet I was so ready to leave my job at that time. I cried so hard to Allah asking Him to help me and had a strong belief inside my heart that
“Whatever Allah takes from me will always be replaced with something better”
And so I believed that my job was taken from me, I believed that Allah would replace it with something better. The next thing I knew was when I woke up early at 5.00, I received a notice from now my school that I was accepted and here I am. Oh, looking back at that time, bittersweet and this gave me strength again. And oh, looking back, that was also around the time I struggled with being in the middle of uncertainty but looking at it now, we figured it out eventually.
Life will not always be easy all the time. In the same sense, Life also will not always be hard all the time.
In this kind of mess and when I feel like life is quite hard, I often look back and ask myself “Is life really bad, and has it been going on forever?”
I realized that last month was actually one of the absolute best months in my 25 years of living. It’s only fair for my life to feel a bit like I am walking on a rocky path for now. One day I will have everything figured out again and have everything back on track again. Per at least, I am not staying and do nothing — I write this to give my mind some peace and some clarity.
This sucks but this writing has a purpose: validating my thought, helping me clear out my mind which for the time being my journal has not been able to serve this purpose, and for me to look back again when things are figured out and we are back on track. Publishing this here in case any of you also feel a bit lost at the moment. That is okay, we will figure out everything again, if not always. We will always figure it out again if not everything.
Oh, and one more thing:
