3 Lessons On My 33rd Birthday
Today’s my birthday!
As I celebrate one more year of making it alive and -kinda- well, I’m sharing the 3 main lessons I learned during my 33rd lap around the sun:
LESSON #1: Life isn’t “fair”
And the sooner you accept it, the more rewarding your life will be.
Is it fair that I’ve spent an entire 2 months crying in pain, visiting 8 doctors and paying a month’s salary worth of tests to try and get a diagnosis that I still don’t have?
Probably not.
Is it fair that said month’s salary is 10x what someone in my home country makes because I was born into privilege and got the resources I needed to get here?
Probably not either.
Things don’t happen because you deserve them. They just happen.
All you can do is play the cards you’re dealt in the best way you can.
Your definition of ‘best way’ and mine will be different, though… Do your best to stay in your lane and avoid following a rule book.
My definition: doing stuff to make myself happy as long as it doesn’t harm others.
Sometimes the odds will be in my favor. Sometimes they won’t.
Life plays by its own rules.
Rules that are a freaking mystery to me — and I’m not sitting around here trying to figure them out. Hard pass.
I’d rather spend my time in the ocean.
Expecting life to be fair can and WILL lead to resentment when unfair things happen to you.
That’s normal. But it’s bad for you.
Resentment is a heavy burden to carry and it will chip away at your heart if you hold on to it.
When unfair shit happens, the easiest way I’ve found out of resentment is to keep being grateful even on the hard days.
And to stop trying to give meaning to *everything*.
I always say ‘everything happens for a reason’, but when I’m down in the dumps, in physical pain and battling a mysterious illness that …
I allow myself to scrap that for a while.
Life isn’t fair, and I’ve learned to be OK with that. I promise the next 2 lessons aren’t as gloomy.
LESSON #2: There is no age limit for debunking the shit you’ve been told about yourself
My best friend is a personal trainer (and a damn good one).
Once we were chatting about how I hit my foot with a surfboard and spiralled into thinking I suck at sports, and she sent me this:
I’m putting this screenshot here so you feel validated, just like I did.
Apparently, this is a common theme.
If you were bullied or told you were worth shit by gym teachers at school, welcome to the club. It’s nice here. We’re all playing sports and nobody’s being made fun of.
Now in all seriousness…
How many of us believed this crap and for how long?
It took me almost 30 years alive to realise that I actually LOVE sports…
Hell, I even love the gym!
And for the biggest shocker: turns out I’m good at (at least some of) them.
Thinking I was “bad at sports” kept me from trying a lot of new things over the years.
Things I’m now obsessed with. (Yes, I’m talking about surfing. This is a public apology to my partner for suddenly wanting to plan our nomadic lives around swells and seasons 😂.)
The point is:
Change the narratives others told you about yourself if you don’t like them.
Because often times, they’re not even true.
And if they are…
Who says they need to stay that way?
There is no age limit for being who you enjoy being.
LESSON #3: When it rains, it pours
You would think I’d learned this by now, given I’ve been living in tropical islands for 5+ years and all.
Well, apparently I didn’t take the hint.
It took my friend and mentor, Dayana, saying it for it to get real.
I went from being down to only 1 client in my business to being slightly OVERbooked…
In 1 day.
I guess the real lesson here is that unless you have a rock solid network of people who could potentially be your clients, there are no certainties in freelancing.
You can be making $20,000 one month and $0 the next.
You can lose a 2-year retainer because a company is going under.
Your most successful client can shut down their business due to personal stuff.
There are ZERO guarantees.
So if you’re a freelancer like me, the best thing you can do is to never stop building that network.
But if you’re expecting me to say that a 9 to 5 will give you more stability…
Well, sorry, but no.
The reasons I listed above still apply if you’re an employee. Only it will hurt more because you thought it was stable.
Get rid of the idea of ‘stability’ and instead, spend your time planning how to build the life that you want.
I am by no means feeding the (irresponsible IMO) narrative that ‘everyone can achieve everything’…
But I do believe you’ll be happier if you make your life about TRYING.
The key to lesson #3 is that both good AND bad shit tends to cluster up.
It’s chaotic and completely unnecessary if you ask me, but we’re back to lesson #1 with me not wanting to figure out life’s rulebook.
So just make sure that when the good stuff is pouring, you stay in the here and now so you can soak it all in.
And when the shitstorm arrives?
Surf that wave, fall as many times as you need, and find a lesson to enjoy life even more when the storm clears.
