Dear Jeanette,
I know you're having a hard time growing into the woman you want to be. I know that you feel like you need to catch up and make up for lost time. I know that you feel that if you had opportunities given to you as a child, you would be great now.
I know you want to be the best of the best but you just don't know how to put forth the effort. You don't know how to manage time. You don't know how to sit your butt down and get work done. You don't know how to go to class everyday and you don't exactly know how to even study.
You struggle with consistency and self discipline. These traits, among other things, lead to failure.
And that failure, to be the best of the best, drives you to wild emotions of sadness, anger, resentment and hatred. Avoid this place of darkness. Avoid blaming others for your mistakes. Avoid knocking yourself down and beating your confidence to a bloody pulp simply because you couldn't accomplish a task far beyond your skill.
This darkness tempts you into distracting yourself from the good things in life. It wants you to sit and dream and never adventure. It wants you to give up on school. It wants you to stay up late at night and not wake up the next morning. It wants you to not even bother with the challenges of school, work and life simply because it takes effort.
You know all of this.
And you're making progress.
But it's time, and I know it's hard, to kick it up a notch.
It's time to put the broken pieces of your confidence back together.
Accept this difficult but significant time in your life. Accept that you are teaching yourself the things that you wish you had learned a long time ago.
Accept that it will take time. And although you may not always succeed, that you are still making progress and learn to be content with that. Progress is the key.
Remember the gifts and blessings that you have.
Remember that there is always time to learn and that you'll never actually come to a point where you cease to learn.
Remember to laugh.
And don't be ashamed of who you are.
Be humble.
I got this.
3 comments:
You are truly brilliant! I love how well you can articulate your thoughts and feelings into words on a page. This is obviously a talent backed up by education. That's what its really about...expanding and discovering who you are and your own uniqueness through learning. Don't be so hard on yourself. The Jeanette I know dislikes boundaries, rules, and limitations. Perhaps you are stressed by school and other responsibilities because they inhibit your sense of freedom. I wish I would have buckled down more in my youth. I lacked some maturity back then. Now, I wish I would have stuck with something. I'm playing catch up big time. Hang in there. What you accomplish now will only give you bigger wings to fly later.
Hey, you've come so far already! Don't get discouraged, think about all the things you've already accomplished and how amazing that is, because it is amazing.
In a way, I kind of feel like I'm in the same boat as you so I don't know if I should be talking :P But trusting God and putting adventure-time into your schedule are two things I especially like :)
You can do it! I love you!
I use to write myself letters all the time too. They were a powerful tool for me at times.
There is even purpose in failure if we look at it from the perspective of progression. But here's the trick to it...look at it with an eternal perspective.
Circumstances beyond your control, in a temporal sense, may seem to have deprived you of valuable lessons and experience as a youth, but in an eternal sense blessed you with the determination to discover and lead your life according to the plan a loving Heavenly Father set out for you in this life.
Some would say that failure and frustrations are acts of weakness we must pressure ourselves to overcome. I think they are tools to develop our strengths and find answers.
Afterall, Edison didn't have over 3,000 failures. He had 3,000 ways the lightbulb didn't work and all helped him to the final one that did.
Jen
PS-read Ether 12:27
Post a Comment