how does your garden grow?

“I wish I was taught at a young age that it is okay to fail.”

Wise words of wisdom from somebody that didn’t know a damned thing about anything.

I wrote this my senior year of high school. December 2019 to be exact. Two years ago. It’s crazy how much life has changed since then. Two years ago, I was uncomfortable in my own life. Two years ago, I didn’t even want to make it past eighteen, let alone graduate high school. Two years ago, I was a hollowed-out version of myself living each day as a lie.

A lot can change in two whole years. Some people meet the love of their life and two years later are happily married. Some people watch their newborn baby grow up into a toddler with a wild and precious personality. Other people are in the exact same place, feeling as if nothing changed at all.

But really, it did.

For the longest time, I thought that nothing had changed about me in two years. At the start of this school year, I still felt the same way I had my senior year of high school: stuck, bored, and lonely.

Stuck in the same city I have lived in since 2007. Bored of my life and envious of everyone else who seemed to have it much better than I did. Lonely because I still hadn’t made the friends I wanted.

But situations don’t have to change in order to experience change. You can still work the same old boring office job for two years but find an abundance of change in your life. You don’t have to move cities or look different to experience change. In fact, I look the same as I did when I was thirteen years old, just a little older and probably all the none wiser.

How did I change then if I still look the same, act the same, live in the same city, etc?

People change naturally, whether they want to or not. Your values and beliefs change with time, as you get older and more exposed to the words. The things that mattered most to you when you were five years old, like a teddy bear called baby, lose their importance and value. Your new favorite toy goes from baby the teddy bear to your phone. The candy that gave you a rush all those years ago gets replaced with drugs, because you miss the high. Aging is natural, whether we want it to or not. Every single aspect in our life changes and ages, and sometimes we don’t even notice it.

I thought I hadn’t changed at all. I can still feel stuck, lonely, and bored but be a whole new me. Change can be negative too. I still feel stuck, but this time it’s because I want to skip to the part of my life where I am married with a job and a family. I am still bored, because now I want to go to med school instead of learning about Bio 2 or Organic chemistry. I am still lonely because I don’t feel fulfilled in all aspects of my life.

But with the negatives comes the positives too.
The things I thought stayed the same about me are wholly different. In fact, I am a whole different Maria than I was two years ago, and I don’t even know if I would recognize the girl I used to be. Would I even be her friend? Probably not, because the things that are important to me now are so different than the things that were important to me then. My standards simply have changed.

I am stronger mentally and can push through problems that used to bother me so long ago. I don’t care what other people think about me, even though I used to. I am more confident in what I look like and don’t hide behind my clothes anymore. I wake up each day with a smile on my face because I am genuinely excited to try something new.

But one crucial thing about me has stayed the same. Almost two years later and I still haven’t taken my own advice. I still haven't learned that it’s okay to fail. I’m not just talking about school here. We can fail in so many other ways at life. Sometimes we fail academically, sometimes we fail in broken friendships. Sometimes our bodies fail us, and we didn’t even do anything wrong. Trust me, I’ve failed a lot over the past year academically and will most likely fail over and over again in the next six years of my academic career. I’ve lost people that used to mean the world to me, and now I don’t even know what makes them happy anymore, when in the moment, it was my number one priority. But people come and go with time, and it takes a lot to learn how to let someone go.

The ultimate question is: will it still bother me? Will I still feel like I’m not cut out to follow my dreams? Will I still feel like a failure in every single stupid thing I do? Probably, but only time will tell.

The truth about ourselves always comes out, whether we want it to or not.

My truth is this. It takes me a long time to grow. It took me two years how to learn how to be happy again. I always thought since I used to be a happy kid, that it should be natural. But like I said, we change. The happiness I felt in middle school isn’t the happiness I will feel as an almost twenty-year-old. And the sadness I felt for seven long years won’t last forever. I had to learn how to find what makes me happy now, and that’s okay. It’s okay that it took me two plus years to heal from a lifetime of various traumas. I had to essentially rewrite my entire narrative from sad girl to girl who was simply trying.

Healing and progress aren’t linear processes. We have our ups and downs all the time, and that’s normal.

Healing. Takes. Time.

What you thought made you happy short term might not be best for you long term. The people who you surrounded yourself with might have been slowly poisoning you all along, even if you thought you were happy. It’s a tricky process, and I myself haven’t even figured it all out yet. It takes a lot of trial and error, tears and heartbreak, sadness and denial to figure out who you are.

I’ve found that the hardest relationship of all to form was the one with myself.

You are your biggest supporter, and hardest critic. And the only person who is ever going to truly care about your failures and successes is yourself. You might feel that other people care, but everyone truly only cares about themselves, so why shouldn’t you?

So, if you take away anything from this, know that your life is in your hands. YOU control how your story is written. If you want a wonderful fantastical life, then grow yourself a garden. Maybe your flower won’t grow right away. Maybe it will take you half your life. But you can find peace in failure. You can find beauty in the ugliest of days. You can truly be happy, even if you have to keep trying.