How to find happiness in academic environments

I always felt that someone’s true potential can be seen when they are put in tough situations. To be challenged and to overcome in a glorious feat of perseverance is a reflection of their character. I am not a guru. I never claimed to be a guru… but my God, the past few years of my life did teach me a lot about myself. I am the happiest now than I have been in the past half of my life. If I can boil everything down to a few phrases, it would be this:

You are enough. You always were. Seek happiness for yourself. Life is too short for anything less.

I don’t think that my past self would have ever thought that I would be at the place I am at right now mentally, physically, and spiritually.

To be honest, when writing this post, I thought that I was being too pretentious, but rest assured, that was never the goal. If life has told me anything, it has always been to just not care, to let go, and to do what you want. Hence why I started writing shitty blogs on a website no one will probably read except for my dad and my dog. He’s a pretty smart cookie.

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Let me take you back to…

Freshman year: individuality

I was a very desperate individual. I wanted to be liked by everyone, even if it meant giving up a part of myself that made me… me. And did it work? Yes, it worked. I fit their cookie-cutter, basic brown (white) guy starter pack mold.

I would operate my day wearing a mask. I was like the Joker, if the Joker was brown and his love for killing was replaced by a desire to look at people’s teeth intensely. I will be a dentist soon.

Ego is a mask that we all wear to function in society, like everyone is actors playing a role.

After a while, it started getting very draining. Every day, I would wake up and want my friends to like me. To belong was to be accepted, and belonging at the time felt like I was an actor. I used to be funny; then, against all odds, I became nonchalant. I was a puppet tangled in strings. So… I stopped. And what changed for me? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Was I scared that people would not like me? Sure, but scary situations aren’t scary; it’s just very vivid imagination and insecurity. Confidence isn’t gained; it’s lost. What you gain is insecurity, something that needs to be lost to bring your confidence to where it was before.

Your puppet masters don’t want you to please them. Even if these individuals actually wanted you to please them, do you need to? Can people force their needs above yours? Exactly. If we show boundaries, they’ll either respect them or they will not value them. In that case, you probably know what your future relationship with the individual will look like.If you were pleasing them, it was to cope with your own insecurities.

We suffer more in our imagination than in our reality. These worries that you may feel don’t want to be challenged, and they aren’t going to change. They have a terrible track record, so just let them go.

The final thing I would like to say on this is that the more we seek approval, the less we get of it. People respect authenticity. If our actions don’t fit other people’s expectations, then that’s their problem, not ours.

I want to say that none of this would have been possible for me without my friends. One in particular, Yuvraj, talked me through a lot. Find good friends. Surround yourself with people that appreciate and respect you for you. All parts of you.

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Sophomore year: comparison

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This was the year that I had the hardest classes and the horrific, war-crime-worthy Dental Admissions Test, the five-hour-long test that basically determined where I would go to school. When going through hard classes and standardized tests, sometimes my brain wanders to what others were scoring or whether I was doing well enough in comparison to my peers.

Comparison seeped into other aspects of my life, like self-image. It started affecting me in ways that I couldn’t notice at the time.

I always had a plan in my head, a plan to do certain things by certain times. To achieve goals and set yourself to a high standard doesn’t inherently sound bad, but it gets detrimental if you tie your self-worth to meeting those standards, push them into unrealistic territory, and become rigid or self-critical when reality doesn’t match the plan. It then will turn goal-setting into a source of chronic stress, avoidance, or burnout rather than growth.

Sometimes we will feel ashamed of ourselves. There’s a version of me that could be doing x, y, and z perfectly. We all think that the antidote to shame is success, but it has the opposite effect. Success will never be met because you will keep pushing the goalposts back. You don’t resolve shame by achieving more. You reinforce it because each success temporarily quiets it, then raises the standard again, leaving your self-worth contingent and never secure.

Be secure with what you achieved. Sometimes, I forget all that I have done, so I keep a little note in my Notes app. It’s my “win list.”

Sometimes, life won’t be nice to you. You can’t control everything that happens to you. Even if you do things perfectly, you can’t control it. Life is in your own hands and no one else’s. Don’t push responsibility into the air and wait for someone’s approval.

As for comparison, it’s thieving your joy. Your brain likes to compare because it uses it as a coping mechanism for your lack of worth in yourself, always working to be better than the competition rather than focusing on yourself. Because what can you really change? Other people? No. If you do end up comparing, compare yourself fairly. Look at the whole person, not just one aspect of them.

If you focus on the past, you are prone to depression, and if you focus on the future, you are prone to anxiety. If you can control the attention of your mind, the depression and anxiety go away.

When you stress about repeatedly reminding yourself to do tasks, you are spending more willpower than necessary to do the task and draining yourself of the willpower necessary to do the task. Try in your actions every day because that’s all you can do. At the end of the day, you should be satisfied that you tried the hardest you could. Holding yourself to unreal standards and stressing over them are weights that hold you down from trying.

For the rest of my school, I am very grateful that I have found a loving girlfriend and friends to help me through hard times. I am forever grateful. I am sure I will think of more things to add on to this, so I will update this post or make new posts periodically.