The summer is not quite over, but I can't help but to reflect on the crazy things that have happened to me & how I am STILL learning how to be patient.SetbacksWell, y'all know how the story goes.. one minute everything is going all good, the next minute everything falls apart. I went from being an ecstatic recent college grad to a couch hopping, struggling to make ends meet, dealing with normal-yet-unnecessary-bullshit type of gal. My summers always tend to humble me, but this one was surely different by far. Shifts always happen in my life (as they do in all of ours) but I think my dramatic reaction to everything just made things ten times worse than what they needed to be. Lol. Let's also factor in that since I graduated I no longer have access to counseling, so ya girl REALLY felt like she was losing her mind. At first, I simply wanted to cry and crawl into a hole, then I had to give myself a pep talk and force myself to remember all that me & my former counselor discussed in our sessions & how to apply those solutions we came up with to real life. It's hard staying positive 25/8 and I know now that it's okay not to be okay. However, there is ALWAYS something I can do about it, I just have to be willing to put the work in. ComebacksSo I went through a thing. And while I'm not at 100% YET, I can say that I'm better (kinda) than I was earlier this summer and my optimistic side says that's what matters most. In my world, moving forward is extremely important and it was never about the number of L's I take, but how hard I bounce back from said L's. Understand this: mistakes and setbacks and delays are soooo common in life. There is no way to get out of it, like you cannot finesse or scam the struggle. You may think you can, buttttt it will come and find you and force you to learn a lesson over and over again until you get it 🙃. Me personally, I'm going to learn the lesson of patience over and over again until I actually be still 🙃🙃🙃🙃 how irritating for a control freak like me! But in order to truly be my best self, it is necessary for me to go through those setbacks so I can come back harder than before. New beginningsJune and July kicked my ass. So when August came around, I have been ecstatic. 8 is the number of new beginnings and I have been practicing remaining open minded to all the new things I will be experiencing this month. Of course, embracing new beginnings does not exempt you from anxiety. Lately I've been questioning things like "Am I really good at this adulting thing?" "Will I ever find a stable place to live?" "Am I going to be able to do well at my new job?" The answers won't come right away but the lesson in all of this comes back down to patience. I was venting to my mom recently and I asked "how many times do I have to learn the lesson of being patient?!" She glanced at me and said, "Until you learn to actually be still."A light bulb went off. And I have been able to breathe a little easier. As I said earlier in this post, I'm not exactly at 100% but I'm also not as bad off as I thought I was nor am I feeling like I was in the beginning of the summer. I'm not sure what you've been dealing with this summer, but maybe we share a common theme: learning how to be patient, not letting setbacks defeat us, not letting comebacks scare us and embracing all the new beginnings life has to offer. As cliché as it sounds, it gets better. Just be still.