Dear friend
How do you know what is important to you? How often do you do things because others tell you but they don’t necessarily align with something inside of you?
One thing that I don’t often talk about is that I dropped out of university when I was 20. For a very long time, I carried a lot of shame and embarrassment surrounding it. Over the years I have made my peace with it, I simply accepted it as a fact, something that has happened to me in the past. Occasionally, I still get that ping that I have failed. But what is interesting that I have never seen it as a mistake. I always knew that it was the right thing for me to do.
One day I will tell the whole story but in a nutshell - I simply couldn’t handle the pressure of life. I had a lot of stuff happening to me in my teenage years and for the few years, I just carried on living by inertia. When I was a child, I always had a lot of expectations piled on my shoulders - I had to be good in school (and I was for a long time, I even managed to get into a very fancy math grammar school in Latvia), I had to go to university (I did get into a Scottish university) and I had to have a good job (which I did but only when I approached my 30s). So this inertia that I got spun in when I was a kid, got me to the age of 19. Things started to break when I was around 17 but still not enough to have a life-changing effect.
Then, I moved to the UK and everything started to fall apart. Firstly, I didn’t have enough money to survive, my mum helped a bit but it only covered my accommodation. Nothing else. So I desperately needed a job and it took me 5-6 months to get one that actually paid reasonably. But most importantly I didn’t understand why I was in uni studying politics (I still love politics and history and read a lot about it to this day), I didn’t see how it will serve me in my life. So I started skipping classes and slowly stopped going completely. The thing is, I was majorly depressed at the time, as I had a lot of unprocessed baggage that I kept carrying around. I even thought that by moving to a different country it will go away. It didn't. I had no idea, and more importantly, I didn’t know that I can ask for help...so I did the only things I knew how and it was - to pretend that everything is fine and lie to people around me because I was so ashamed to admit that I was falling apart.
Somehow I was born with a very strong inner compass that leads me in life. And that was the first time when I broke the pattern that I was getting pushed into and followed myself instead. Now I know to trust that feeling and lean into where it is calling me. Things like starting a blog, launching a podcast or putting myself out there on the internet - I do these things because they feel right. I am not 100% sure where it will take me but I know it will be the right place for me.
