My History and Why of Self Improvement

 

Why Self Improvement

            This post is basically going to recap my self-improvement journey and kind of lay out my why for self-improvement (not directly because I am not comfortable speaking on that just yet). The aim of this blog is to serve as an inspiration of sorts. More importantly, when I first embarked on this journey, I did not find much talking about improving in high school and college. While older influencers would mention it, I could not find people of this age group keeping track or speaking on it. In a way, I want to fill that void with this blog.

 

Self-Improvement History:

            The vast majority of my journey started in high school. I never really felt like I fit in high school and just in life. There was a multitude of reasons for this but the primary one being, I had to become mature at a young age. This isn’t an attempt to diss my parents but it just so happen the time I was born, my family had a rough patch. Not going to go into great detail, because that’s not the scope of this post, but growing up quicker was just necessary. This led to me having trouble finding my “clique” in life and especially in high school. I found wrestling and became dedicated to that. While I was never great at the sport, it served as a catalyst for self-improvement. The sport required dedication and taught me sometimes you have to go without for a goal.

            Joining BJJ and training with mostly adults was the second part of this journey. This required a lot of mental toughness and led to me reading Mediations by Marcus Aurelius. The book sparked my love of reading and bettering myself. When the COVID lockdown hit, I found the time to be beneficial. While I had plenty of bad habits, such as staying up to 4 AM and gaming all day, I added some positive things to my life that still remain to this day. For a while, I stayed stagnant up until high school graduation.

Current Times:

            After graduation, I moved out. I will not go into great detail but this period (July 2022-Now) was rough. Being young and not knowing how some stuff works, I had a lot of growing up to do. For example, I would forget to pay bills and the water would get cut off. My mom even supported the idea just because throwing myself into the deep end like this would teach me so much (Just to note: My parents would not let me fail but they would let me suffer the consequences of doing dumb stuff). During the first couple months, my mental health tanked. I turned to some bad habits to help cope. College started and I still found myself to just not really fit in. My college is largely a party school and I’m not a fan of that culture. The consequences of this ended up being me feeling sorry for myself and just not loving life (I was never depressed). All these emotions came to a spear head in winter break.  

            Winter break 2022 proved to be my “pivot block”. 5 weeks to myself and no reason to go anywhere. For the most part, I really got stuck in the “self-development hell” stage. Everyday, I would tell myself today was the day but I would revert to old habits. This stage really just made me miserable. After the break was over, I decided to really start changing stuff. Fast forward to a couple weeks ago, I met someone in a similar situation to me. This guy was a freshman, my age, and had his own place. I went to one of his parties, which would technically be a party of my peers, and had a break through. I did not fit in and felt like an old man. Also, I did not understand the appeal of getting pissy drunk and really living that degenerate life style that colleges with a party culture can produce. After this party, I really put my nose to the grind wheel and dropped a lot of vices. I figured if I wasn’t going to fit in, I should do something productive with it.

            While I’m on the beginning of this journey, I have already learned a lot. Mainly keeping busy helps to fight mediocrity. I was meditating the other night and realized that while I moved out, I’m not independent as of now. Seeing this hole in my developmental skill, I am working to learn how different stuff works so at least I will know about something I don’t know versus not knowing about something I don’t know. One of the other big holes in my development is my social life. While I do not want to fall into that party every weekend and get blackout drunk lifestyle, I want to find a group or just something that allows me to hang with like minded people and not really on substances to have a good time.