Do you ever look at some of the achievements of your peers/classmates/friends and think wow, what am I doing with my life? Maybe you find yourself feeling a little inferior because they are after all your age group and it seems like they have their life all figured out while you’re perhaps stuck in a rut? This was a feeling a friend of mine confessed to entertaining temporarily one day when she saw a former classmate of hers post a work achievement on instagram. Like her, I too have had that little spiral one too many times and it was worse when I didn’t get a job immediately after service year. Even now that I’m employed, I have sometimes felt a little left behind when I see some of my peers doing work they are passionate about and conquering rooms one could only dream of. Over time, I have come to accept a particular truth, which I told her and would share with you;
Even flowers planted at the same time, don’t always bloom together.
Yes, you may have started the race of life together and finished university/NYSC at the same time but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your race experience should look like theirs. Some may get the job almost immediately or even the love of a lifetime but it doesn’t take away from your timeline. Learn to trust your process and believe that for as long as you’re doing the work required, eventually things would fall in pleasant places for you. That late bloomer flower isn’t just sitting idly feeling sorry for itself and envying the blossomed petals of its peers. Internally, there’s some work going on in the roots and in its environment. And at the right time, it blossoms.
That’s just to encourage you to be patient, to work on yourself so that when opportunity comes it meets you prepared and to also celebrate your peers too because someday it would be you. Learning and accepting this truth has made it so much more easier for me to embrace the wins of my high flier friends while also trusting that one day it could be me. Whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of comparison, for it truly is the thief of joy. You see the irony of life is, someone else is looking at your accomplishments (no matter how little they may seem to you) in envy and wishing they were in your shoes.
I hope you feel better now.
