Here's to 2020

Although it seems that the year passed so quickly, it has been filled with a lot of personal growth. I lost myself, found myself, lost loved ones, gained loved ones, lost people I thought I knew, found people I was destined to know.  I'm so grateful for all the opportunities that have come my way, but more grateful for my failures of the year as it has taught me a lot of things and been a huge learning curve in my life. I know that everything that occurs in life is supposed to happen for a reason, but I am so ready to close the chapter of 2019 and open a new one, ready for all the things that stand before me. Lets hope the new year is full of lots of happiness, love, blessings and accomplishments.

Here's to 2020.

The voice of self compare

The voice that loves to condemn,

The voice that leaves us feeling unworthy and inferior,

The voice that pops up like an unwelcome guest. 

The voice of self-compare.

Imagine sitting in a coffee shop and a complete stranger comes up to you, picking out your insecurities and pointing out how others in a café were superior to you. I'd hope that we'd all walk off and ignore that stranger and defend ourselves.

"who are they to talk about me like that , they don't know me?'

So why do we accept talking to ourselves like this? Is it because it feels so real that we believe WE are the voice? I mean, the voice comes from inside us, so why should we not trust it? The truth is, comparing ourselves is actually an inherit instinct. In prehistoric ages, this would allow to quickly analyse others to identify possible threats. However, in todays society these swift comparisons may be causing harm rather than prevent it. You see, in modern life, we are still comparing but we're not in small groups anymore, in fact groups are huge and social media gives us access to even more people for us to compare to. This constant comparison heightens our worries about getting judged, rejected or not being good enough. So what should we do?

I came to a realisation a while ago that I will never win playing the game of self comparison. No matter how many books I read, there will always be someone smarter, no matter how much I work out, there will always be someone in better shape. Only, just knowing these things doesn't mean that I am able to stop comparing myself to others. I've tried to make a conscious effort to try to identify when I'm making a comparison and try to bring my attention elsewhere.

I like to remind myself that growth is unconscious. We're forever growing, learning and achieving. Yet, we fail to recognise this when we're comparing ourselves to others. I think we are blind to our own progress and hyper vigilant of other's. No matter how I feel, I try to remember that I was better than I was yesterday, and the day before that and the day before that. We've all had challenges, but we ploughed through them to get to where we are today.

It's also important to remember the people that i'm comparing myself to are not flawless. I think we all know that no one is perfect, but emotionally we seem to feel bad when we don't match the progress of others. We shouldn't focus on how we rank in comparison to others, I like to think of life as a journey. That journey had nothing to do with how well other people are doing, or what they have. It has everything to do with what we want to do, and where we want to go. That's all we need to worry about.

After all, wouldn't it be boring if we were all the same?

time

Time feels like it’s moving faster than ever. Weeks blur into months, months into years, and before you’ve properly settled into one season, the next one has already arrived. Birthdays come around too quickly. Another year ends while you still feel like you were just getting started. There’s a constant sense of being behind, even when you’re busy and doing everything you are meant to be doing.

I often think about how strangely memory holds time. My grandfather passed away what feels like two years ago, yet emotionally it feels like yesterday. I can remember the weight of it, the details, the feeling, as if no time has passed at all. But then I think about an accident that happened when I was six, and it feels like it should have been far more than sixteen years ago. Those two moments sit in my life completely differently, even though the clock says otherwise.

I researched why this happens, and there are real psychological reasons time feels like it is speeding up. When we are younger, everything is new. The brain works harder to process and store first experiences, which makes time feel fuller and slower. As adults, life becomes more repetitive. Days follow familiar patterns, and with fewer new memories being formed, the brain compresses time. When we look back, whole stretches seem to disappear.

There is also a simple truth about proportion. Each year becomes a smaller fraction of the life we have already lived, so it feels shorter. Add to that constant distraction, split attention, and chronic stress, and our brains stop fully registering moments. We move from coping to coping rather than experiencing, and time slips through unnoticed.

This is not a personal failure. Time feels faster because modern life removes pauses and rewards constant engagement. Understanding this does not slow time down, but it does explain why some moments feel frozen while others vanish. Time itself has not changed. What has changed is how deeply we are able to live inside it.

Not being known as the sick kid

Going to university felt like a reset. A chance to start all over again.

Before everything changed, I was clever. I don’t say that to brag, I say it because it mattered to me. Learning came naturally. Thinking felt fast. I trusted my brain.

Then my brain disease slowed my cognitive ability, and suddenly I could feel the difference. Processing took longer. Concentration was harder. I noticed it before anyone else did, but eventually others noticed too.

At school, I think my teachers struggled with how to handle me. I don’t blame them. I know they probably didn’t want to push the sick kid. But that lack of pressure, even when it came from kindness, slowly changed how I saw myself. Encouragement faded. Expectations lowered. And without meaning to, I started to believe them.

University was different.

No one knew my history. No one knew what I’d been through. I wasn’t “the ill one” or “the fragile one.” I was just another student in the room. And that anonymity gave me something I didn’t realise I’d lost.

Freedom.

At uni, I wasn’t defined by what had happened to me. I could work at my own pace without being pitied. I could struggle without it being medicalised. I could succeed without it being framed as “inspiring.”

I learned that my intelligence didn’t disappear, it just changed shape. I learned differently now. Slower, maybe. More intentionally. With more effort and more patience. And that doesn’t make it any less real.

Starting again helped me rebuild confidence on my own terms. Not as the person I used to be, but as the person I am now.

University didn’t fix everything. But it gave me back something important. The belief that I am more than my illness, and that I still deserve to be challenged, trusted, and taken seriously.

Sometimes starting over isn’t about becoming someone new.

It’s about remembering who you were before the world started treating you differently.

dreaming of illness

 I’ve always believed some of us feel the future before we live it.

Long before it happened, I knew I was going to be ill. Not in a hopeful way. Not in a dramatic or attention seeking way. I didn’t wish it into existence. I experienced it quietly, over and over, in my dreams.

I would dream of being unwell. Of weakness. Of my body not doing what it was meant to do. In those dreams, the feeling stayed with me long after I woke up. It wasn’t fear exactly. It was familiarity. As if my mind was rehearsing something my body hadn’t caught up to yet.

I never imagined how ill I would actually become.

Dreams have a strange way of blurring intuition and imagination. We’re taught to dismiss them, to label them as coincidence or anxiety. But sometimes they feel more like messages. Not predictions, but warnings. A way of preparing us for something we don’t yet have language for.

When the illness finally arrived, it wasn’t unfamiliar. It was heavier, more consuming, more real than anything I’d dreamed. But there was a strange recognition in it. As if some part of me had been there before.

I don’t know if this is about fate, intuition, or the body speaking before the mind listens. I just know that sometimes we sense what’s coming long before it shows itself.

And even when we can’t change the future, maybe those quiet moments of knowing are there to help us survive it.

overthinking

No matter how hard we try, we will never be able to conquer the complex anatomy of the human brain. Some of us will undoubtedly make everything seem more confusing than itself, creating a space in which we suffocate ourselves with overthinking (I know I do). 

I used to believe there would never be a time where I could calm my overactive brain, however, I'm a couple of months in to proving my theory wrong. We can not always control what hand we are dealt in life, but we CAN control how we decide to embrace what is thrown our way to live the best life that we possibly can.

Your time will come for you to smile without having broken pieces hanging around your face. Everyone is different,  you will be able to enjoy life again. You may have your bad days, but you will be able to see that YOU ARE in control.