A Lifetime Achievement Award for… Me
Recently, I discovered the Mel Robbins Podcast on Spotify. I’ve seen her TedX talk, but didn’t know she had a podcast as well. I don’t listen to podcasts regularly, but I’ve found that listening to Mel Robbin’s podcast makes cleaning my kitchen a bit less boring. Today, I checked my Spotify feed and saw a podcast from earlier this week titled “2 Ways to Believe in Yourself & Achieve Cool Things”, which is a pretty solid title. So as I started to tackle the dishes, I listened to Mel talk about the the acceptance speech that Niecy Nash-Betts gave after winning the Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie”. I won’t dig too into the podcast itself, but for context, Niecy was the speech where she thanked herself for believing in herself, especially when nobody else would.
I definitely recommend checking out this podcast episode, because I think it has a great message to it.
At about the 19 minute mark, Mel suggests that everyone take the time to do their own acceptance speech for the lifetime achievement award that we all deserve, and she started by doing her own as an example. Once again, I won’t go over the whole podcast because you should listen to it, but it did make me think about myself.
I will be the very first to admit that the 2020s have not treated me very well. I know it hasn’t treated many of us well, largely in part because of COVID and everything else that has branched off from that madness. 2022 and 2023 were especially rough for me though, because while the world was trying to hard to go back to normal, that was when things started slip downwards. 2022 seemed to be a breaking point for my mental health, and over the past two years, I focused on trying to advocate for what is best for me overall. Sometimes that meant making hard decisions because I knew the easy choice would have been detrimental to my mental health. Other times, it meant deciding to stop waiting for others to do thing I wanted to do. 2022 was the year I decided to travel by myself again, which let me reignite my love for all things Disney. 2022 was the year I realized that my passion in digital media really isn’t in management but in video content and consultation. 2022 was when I started to remove myself from situations that felt toxic because I deserved better.
Bad habits die hard though, and through the second half of 2022 and most of 2023, I kept making decisions that were not the best for me overall but seemed like the “smart choice” at the time. I returned to toxic situations and expected things to be different. I often found myself in situations where advocating for myself would make people upset.
But you know what though?
At the end of the day, I would look at the situation that I had been put in (or had put myself in) and tell myself that I needed to get out of it. Did removing myself from certain situations have immediate negative effects with the hopes that the longterm effects would make it worthwhile? Yes. I will be honest – my current situation is not a fun one to be in. My career is in an scary limbo state and the disastrous economy and job market currently make it a hard state to get out of.
So I would like to thank myself.
Thank you me for making sure that, no matter what, I keep myself in a position where my long term mental health is not ruined further. Thank you for taking the time to invest in learning about how to work with other people, even when it is incredibly difficult for me. Thanks for advocating for myself when clients didn’t respect my work or time. Thanks for recognizing that some people are not going to change, and thanks for letting me accept that and remove myself from situations where those people are not respecting you.
I want to thank myself for still being here. The past few years have seen some very dark moments for me, and in every single one of those dark moments, I recognized it and I reached out for help. I hung on through the multiple storms. And now, going into 2024, I still see storms up ahead, but you know what I have now? A lifeboat. I KNOW I can survive this because I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.
This one is going to be a strange one, but I want to thank me for learning and accepting that people don’t care. And I mean that in the kindest way I can. I finally learnt that the vast majority of people have massive blinders on for their own lives, so when they don’t acknowledge other people suffering, it’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they have their own world to take care of, and usually, the problems I am dealing are not ones they are dealing with so they have no idea! So I want to thank myself for changing the way I look at people and changing the expectations I have on other people. I want to thank me for realizing that maybe I should put blinders on a times too.
I’m really hoping that, in 2024, I can begin to get in touch with not just the person I used to be, but the person I aspired to be when I was a teenager. Many times over the past two years, I’ve thought back to 16-year-old me and wondered what she would think if she saw me today. Usually, I acknowledged that she would be impressed with some things, but she would be disappointed in me for many other things. Most notably, becoming exactly what I hated about with most adults: I became a person who did not keep her hobbies and passions. I lived to work. I’m hoping that I can change that starting in 2024. That is one of the reasons this blog post exists. I used to be an extensive blogger and writer, but that died in me about a decade ago. I’ve decided to bring it back.
Hopefully, I can keep this habit going.
