who are we? [Under editing]

Chapter 1:Your own race.

I remember being in High School and believing that the best way to live life is by constantly aiming to be better than other people, for the longest time I believed that the best version of myself was not good enough unless there was someone that I was competing against, there always had to be someone that would be beneath me in order for me to feel that my achievements amount to anything. 

Maybe there is nothing wrong with competition as we are often told, but there is something wrong with measuring the worth of who you are or the worth of your achievements on what others lack. The problem with this is simple, when there is no one who has not achieved what you have managed to achieve then you start feeling like your achievements are not valid, this is the side of being competitive that I had to let go of, not because I was no longer achieving great things through it, but because for the longest time in my perspective all my achievements had amounted to nothing because someone else had done it better or equally as well as I did.

When we start to understand that life, despite it being a race, is not a race that has only one pace that we all need to subscribe to, it is so important to understand that we all have different things that we want to achieve in life, we all have different places that we wish to see ourselves in, in the next few years, it is because of these differentiated visions and goals that we all have that it is not possible for all of us to run at the same pace.

Often we are told by society that there is a time limit to when we should achieve our goals, we are often told how quickly we need to get a job, start earning money, have children, get married, have a house, have a car, the list is endless. What we fail to often understand however is that all of those time frames and maps that are set out by society of how our lives should go and how quickly we ought to achieve our goals can be a source of depression and anxiety, we start doubting our own abilities because we feel that we are perhaps not moving fast enough. we start asking ourselves questions like;

 "why am I not good enough" 

"Why can't I be more like them"

"Why do I still not have this"

"Why is this still where I am in life"

when we start to ask ourselves these questions, that more often than not will have negative responses, we condemn ourselves for not being like others, for not achieving the things that others have managed to achieve, and then it happens..... we start wanting to achieve all of those things and we forget what our goals are, we forget how we want to live our lives, and we start running at the pace that has been determined by society and the pace that society tells us is the most acceptable pace to run at.

What is important to always remember when we find ourselves strides, miles, or centuries away from where we thought we would be, is that life is a process, it will not always give us the things that we often aspire to achieve, and we will not achieve our goals as quickly or as slowly as other people have, we all write our own destinies, we are all our own goals, and above that this is our race, one that only we can run and at the pace that only we can determine.