It’s times like this when my self-esteem is at its lowest so I end up being one of the potential candidates for the best-sulker-in-the-world.
My eyebrows start to do this weird dance of scrunching up one another, my resting-bitch-face becomes more intensified, and I sometimes start to even pout.
It’s ridiculous.
I told myself I’ll start smiling after being inspired by Copenhagen’s warmth and a surprising amount of smiling, but it’s been difficult to keep it up for a couple of months.
I ask myself the question after receiving rejection emails after rejection emails — is this all worth it?
So it’s times like this when I forget the small things in my life I currently have and brush it aside because of my anger, which isn’t worth, like
To breathe
It’s silly to actually think about breathing because we’re all supposed to be doing it 24/7 and 365 days of the year. The air we inhale and exhale is supposed to come naturally and that’s that.
Right?
I took a couple of yoga classes in NYC and even took some of my friends with me (who took it once and kind of waved a white flag afterward), but during my time in the Czech Republic, I really took yoga seriously after an ex-colleague and friend introduced me to the class one Saturday morning.
I was hooked ever since.
When I moved to Prague to be closer to the city center, I started to attend more of these yoga sessions and it made a tremendous difference in my breathing. I learned that with breathing, I’m able to perform these poses I thought I would never be able to do because they’re too hard, but really concentrating on my breathing first made the poses actually possible.
I’ve also started to enjoy meditating and use it whenever I start to feel hopeless. The main purpose of meditation, I’ve learned, was to focus on my breathing and to keep that focus (and breathing) throughout the day.
Having this breathing in mind has kept me positive and in-line to be consistent with my job-hunting journey. Yeah, there’ll be at times, when my breathing might get out of hand and I might start exploding in tears, but it’s that time when I close my eyes and I inhale with all of the air in my stomach and exhale all of that out of my lungs when I know it’ll be okay.
To look up to the sky
I tend to forget to look up whenever I’m frustrated. I’m either staring angrily at a screen or dozing off and thinking about the moves I could’ve made to make that specific event better.
My first reaction is to pull out my phone or start scrunching up my face and not realize what’s around me.
But when I look up to the sky and just breathe, that’s when I remember to let all of these negative emotions go for that moment and enjoy what the sky is providing me, whether it’s a clear blue, or filled with weirdly-shaped clouds, an airplane flying by, or when the sun is either rising or setting.
Lying down on a bed or even on the floor with my feet up to the window sill as the watch the sky for a couple of minutes gives me a reason to feel like I can persevere and that these negative feelings are minuscule compared to how big the sky actually is.
To pet the cat
I was always confused about why people were so keen on having pets at home. I mean, why would they have another living thing around when you can just enjoy other humans or your own company?
After my parents, siblings, and I had Toby, I started to realize why it is important to have them in my life.
When we first got Toby from a family friend, I think all of us were really excited to have this cute little furry thing around the apartment. He was absolutely adorable. He would follow us around and stare at us with his big green eyes.
Because Toby is an animal who depends on us feeding, playing and cleaning after him, it allows me to be distracted. Doing any of these things gives me a reason to forget why I was angry in the first place.
One day, I would really like to adopt a dog and have him/her slobber me around whenever I start to feel down, but for now, petting Toby seems to be one of the best solutions.
To read my old journal entries and/or posts
Rereading my old journal entries and/or posts usually made me cringe with embarrassment, so I would’ve either hid it really far away or deleted it permanently, but lately, as I’ve been journaling, I’ve had the urge of looking back at writing to see how far I’ve come.
The majority of my writing, in all honesty, was about boys and how heartbroken I was from them, and I should be angry at myself for only writing about boys when reading these entries, but I’m not.
I see how different I am and how much more I’ve grown since these entries. I’ve become more aware of my maturity and laugh at those times I’ve only focused on boys.
I even see the writing style I’ve written and how good some of them really are and start to ask myself if I should incorporate some of those into my current techniques.
Looking back at my entries made me feel appreciated for having the will to even write at all.
Small acts like these, I tend to forget because my emotions get the best of me, just like everybody else.
I might take out my phone and rant to my friends about my bad day or stay in bed and sleep it off, but when I do remember to keep at least one of these small acts in mind, it’s when I realize that that current frustration moment is part of what I’m supposed to be going through and that I will eventually overcome it.
