Monday, August 5, 2019

Things that I did/learnt over the semester break 2019:

1. I got my face mole removed - have been contemplating this for a while and mostly cosmetic reasons (it kept growing over the years) rather than medical, although a friend of mine did suggest I remove growing benign moles anyway.
2. Started going to the gym more: got my membership in february but was half arsed about it, when the break hit I went 4-5 times a week and did mostly cardio. Lost my winter fat but I aim to get more lean for the summer.
3. Smoothie making: got into the habit of making smoothies, might not be a big deal to most people but I am someone who does not cook/make any foods/drinks so this was an achievement and it also supplemented my gym routine. I found a new found love for eating and drinking healthier, and I have realised that my lifestyle habits before was very unhealthy and I gained weight due to laziness and eating out from convenience. I also started to eat more home cooked meals and became more conscious of my calorie intake.
4. Investing: over the holidays I met a few people who enlightened me on ways to invest or build a passive income in the future. It is a very long learning curve and there are so many books and podcasts to read and listen to to learn about how to build your wealth outside of just one career path. It opened my mind up to entrepreneurship and the countless possibilities there are in this world.
5. Mental health: only my close friends know that my mental health journey for the past few years have been a rocky one. It involved many factors, i.e. not doing a course that I saw myself pursuing, being around the wrong friends, not having a healthy relationship with my parents, and most importantly mdma. Mental health is hard because it is abstract, there is no clear cause for what you are experiencing and when you are in it, you don't realise how much it is affecting you and hence you don't know when to seek help.  I could write forever about my experience and not have a clear answer to any of it but all I know is that it has gotten better over the last few weeks. I believe that this is due to my lifestyle change and my realisation of needing a change. I have vowed to never touch mdma again, the depression I got from doing it was the worst state of mind I have ever experienced and it was most likely due to high dose usage over a long period of time. What I thought was 'spacing it out' was not enough and it sucks that I had to experience the worse of it to realise. At the end of the day, I promised myself that my mental health comes first and it means that I will continue to be a healthier person, have a healthier mind and be around people who will support me.
6. Spent alot of time to myself: simply to self reflect and just take a break from being social. I spent my friday nights/saturday nights at home and to also sleep earlier and wake up more fresh. I realised that my sleeping patterns have gotten alot better (sleep earlier, wake up earlier) and since I worked almost everyday in the holidays (around 6 days per week) this helped me get up in the morning. My previous lifestyle throughout previous uni holidays/weekends was going out till late, sleeping in the a.m (or getting no sleep at all) and then rocking up to work totally fucked and sometimes even calling in sick. Proud to say that I went to every shift this holidays and even set my availability to be free everyday.

Hence overall outlook from my 6 week break was to work on myself and build on personal development. I feel like my mentality has matured a lot but still needs alot of work over time.