Embracing the Glorious mess that I am.

A Story by Umaira R

“Embrace the glorious mess that you are.” Elizabeth Gilbert

The moment I saw this short sentence popped up on my instagram feed, I stopped. I stopped, and read it repeatedly for about a good minute. It’s quite ironic how something so short and simple can have such a huge and sudden impact on the way you view your life.

I was never the most confident girl in any room. I have many flaws; I know that I am neither the prettiest nor the smartest girl around. I can be very sensitive over the smallest things. I take things way too personally and I care way too much about what the people around me (whether I know them personally or not) thinks of me. I have done a lot of stupid things in my life. I have made countless mistakes. And I kill myself by over analyzing each and everything someone says, trying to read between the lines. And that has done me nothing except create problems. Not so much with other people but within myself.

I question everything, and I mean EVERYTHING! And for people who does not know what that feels like, I can tell you that it is one of the most draining and exhausting experience that you have to relive over and over again, every single day of your life. It consumes your entire being. The mind is so powerful that once you get lost in it, it’s extremely hard to find your way out. Its like a super complex maze that you just can’t escape.

Why is this happening to me? What is wrong with me? Why can’t I find someone who would truly love me for who I really am? Why do people always leave? Why do they lie? Why would they give me hope and then out of nowhere snatch it away and take a piece of me along with them? I try so hard, why doesn’t it ever work out? Am I trying too hard? But if I don’t try, how will they ever know how much it mattered to me? What am I doing wrong? And many more unanswered questions, circling around in my head, like a Ferris wheel that never stops spinning and there’s no way to ever get off it. It gets to a point that you think to yourself that if you want it to stop you just have to jump off. Making you believe that, to end these haunting thoughts, you have to end it all.

But life is funny, and timing is everything. Just when you think you have lost all the hope you could force yourself to cling on to. Just when you are about to give it all up, something unexpected happens. Something that would have been so insignificant to you at any other moment in your life suddenly became the most important part of the defining moment of your life. I believe that everybody is on a journey of his or her own; everyone has his or her own path to walk on. What may be significant to some may not mean anything to someone else.

And yes for me, it was this one simple sentence. One sentence that helped silenced those haunting thoughts (on most days). I still cant believe in the impact it has on my life, many would not understand and possibly even think I’m quite crazy for giving so much importance to it. But you know what? I don’t care what other people think about it, or about me anymore. I have spent far too long consuming myself with thoughts about other people and what they may think of me. I’ve spent far too long, confining myself to fit into the box drawn out for me by everyone else. To be who people expect me to be, to think the way they expect me to think, to act the way they expect me to act. And when all of that does not coincide with whom I really am inside, I question myself. And that was how I spent my time creating my own hell inside of my head.

But now I know that it’s not the way to live life. You cant live your life based on other people’s opinion of you. Not everyone you meet is going to love you, let alone even just like you. And that’s okay. As long as ‘You’ love yourself, and accept yourself for who you really are, along with all your flaws and all the mistakes you’ve made and will make. Every thought and every action, whether wrong or right, makes up the person that you are today. You have to embrace all that you are, with no apologies, so that no one will ever have the power to make you feel any less of a person that you are meant to be (or is yet to become).

I am a mess. I am a great big mess. I still am trying to figure things out, and I think as long I am alive; the journey of self-discovery will never stop. But I love the mess that I am. It is what makes me human; it is what makes me feel alive. Nothing and nobody is perfect. And I am learning to love my imperfections. Maybe one day I will find someone who would love me for the mess that I am, but even if no one comes along, I will be okay. I have come a long way, to get to where I am today; I know I still have a long way to go. And the road ahead will probably be as bumpy, if not bumpier than the past. But the strength that comes from accepting yourself of who you really are is so incredible that I feel like I almost have a super power. I feel that from now on, no matter what life throws my way, no matter how hard the challenges will be, Me and the glorious mess that I am will take it on and never give up.