Just recently, I’ve noticed that more people have subscribed to my “An over 50 on the Internet” blog where I talk about my 90 Day Challenge! Thank you. It’s nice to have your support. You’re probably wondering how it’s all going and how far I got. Well let me tell you … suspense … drum roll … the outcome was ….
Nahhh, no spoiler alert here. I’ll leave that for later.
My burning inner questions were and still are: “Was I too ambitious? Did I really believe that starting from scratch and making it work could be done in 90 days? considering everything I’ve had to learn and, quite frankly, am still learning?
As an Author/Transformation coach, I encourage people to dream big. As long as we take manageable steps every day; meaning we take that big dream and break it up into realistic bite size chunks, and we keep moving forward, we can pave the way to the stars. The most important thing is to never give up and never lose sight of the end goal.
I could blame life circumstances, and give you more tails of woe than a Chinese Imperialistic Soap Drama but … since we all choose whether to be active creators of our own lives or just wait until life happens to us, I’m the only person to blame. This 90 Day challenge started, because finally, I woke up one day and realised there was never any knight in shining armour blazing a trail to my rescue, swooshing me off my feet and being the provider for our happy ever after.
Until recently, I didn’t even rightfully know when, or why, I even started waiting for someone to save me. I’ve always hustled my way through life, and I’ve made it this far with no-one’s financial help. Truth is, I went through a period of burn-out, which led to procrastination, which led to fear and eventually turned into low self-esteem, depression and suicidal thoughts.
Don’t feel sorry for me. I brought it on myself. I allowed myself to wallow, for far too long, in self-pity and then I chose to live in denial, by creating this safe little bubble around me where I couldn’t get hurt.
Talk about Jekyll and Hyde!!! I’d put one face on for the outside world and keep the other one private to me. Even when I’d decided I was going to committ suicide, aside from one or two people close to me, nobody had any idea of how much torture I was going through inside. As a professional singer, at that time, I laughed louder than anyone, I was the life and soul of any show, but the minute I went home and closed the doors, I shrivelled up into a pile of dehydrated cow-dung! Dark, devoid of anything, purposeless and … NO!!! … I was never smelly! (Just in case you were thinking it!) – I was going to say with no clear sense of direction.
By the way, I’m not knocking dehydrated cow dung. In India, the lesser financially fortunate turn it into patties and sell it as peat. So, even waste by-products have a value to someone somewhere.
The point of this is, that in having such low esteem, at some point I allowed a few people to treat me like it. I’d become a victim of my own mind; blaming circumstances. I became a master excuse maker and the queen of procrastination through avoidance techniques, and let me tell you, it wasn’t because I was lazy.
Despite everything, I still wrote helpful articles for the Internet. I took part in controversial podcasts online. I wrote this book, helped friends out whenever they needed me, volunteered in disaster stricken areas and the list could go on. However, I was living on auto-pilot and not actively living!
I was literally living a double life, one to keep up appearances and one in private. I’ve since become aware of just how many depressed people go through the same thing. It’s not infrequent to hear friends/relatives, of someone who has committed suicide, say: “We didn’t know anything was wrong.”
I’ve digressed slightly from the challenge. Forgive me, but before I got to the juicy part, that I’m sure you all want to know – i.e. the BIG question, did I or did I not make money? – I thought it was appropriate to set the scene and also say that, in hindsight, I’m grateful for all of it.
It’s all fine and well to study psychology, as I did, and even get a Masters degree BUT NOTHING and I mean NOTHING prepares us enough to help others than actually going through it ourselves. And, that goes for any walk of life. We’re never truly equipped to teach others unless we’ve tried and tested something ourselves, first hand.
This challenge has shown me that and, also, really opened my eyes to what an absolute web of worldly distractions the Internet actually is. If we’re not careful, we can get completely lost in it. Not only that, I also learned a whole lot more about myself and how my mind and ego work. Since I’m not unique, I’m sure many other people’s mind and egos work pretty much the same way.
As incredible as this may sound, when I started this 90 challenge to start a new career, at my tender (*cough *cough) age, the Universe and every conspirator going (in my world) set out to test my resolve – and guess what? – Yes, life started to get in the way again!
Only, instead of responding as I did 15 years ago, I took a different approach. After all, if we want tomorrow to be different than today, we have to do something different, right? So, what did I do? I wrote another book. The first major one since 2008.
I didn’t stop there though. I used my multi-lingual skills to translate it into 4 major European languages.
And, I haven’t stopped there … but … for today, I think I’ve given you far too much to read already.
Have a happy weekend Internet Gurus. This Internet Dinosaur will be back next week with Part 2 of what happened with the Challenge. Stay safe and be well.