If I could go back to the version of me that was afraid of taking risks 5 years ago, here's what I will whisper to her- "There's no win without a loss. Get up and have more losses". Somehow I found myself afraid of losing, it was one of my biggest fears while growing up. I could hear my younger self tell me stories of the ridicules I will face if I fail or the stigma of showing one's imperfections to the world. I believed those voices , I wanted to be perfect, the ridicule I thought was a pitfall and a path to my fall.
I never knew the end was actually just the beginning, that the fall was the trigger to be different and a path to knowledge. While I was afraid to try new things, my younger self was starved of growth and for a long time I felt okay with being normal. While others strived and failed, I sat there hovering over one job I was good at. Risk was a no-go zone, the praise was all that mattered. The claps of cymbals and the sounds of tambourines to my mediocrity filled my head and I thought life revolved around perfection.
But I was wrong. Everyone rose from a failure and learned from it. It was something my younger self never told me- I would have taken a lot of risk and failed a thousand times before I was 30. I would have taken my years as an adolescent to explore failures and take a lot of risks that would be a building block to my adulthood. Is it too late? I don't think so, but I've wasted a lot of time dwelling on the myth of perfection. while others said "failure is part of life, my younger self said pursue perfection.
There's something I learned, people who had failed the most in their young age, lived the most successful lives. Their stories became their cornerstones. To each of these cornerstones are wisdom embedded in them to survive and grow. I realized growth isn't a straight line, and the things that felt like " the end" were actually just beginnings. A Chinese adage I love a lot says, the best time to begin was yesterday( and this I have realized in my adulthood) but it ended by saying, the second best time is now( this means our past doesn't matter as long as we are willing to start).
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