Lessons Learned
It's my birthday weekend. I am 33 years old. I know people always say this: but time sure does fly. It seems like only yesterday I was 23 years old, unsure of my future, and now I am 33 years old...and still unsure of my future or my career path.
To be honest, I still feel like I’m 23 years old at least emotionally. Physically is a whole ‘nother story. But while I may not always feel older, the reality is I have learned a lot since I was 23 years old. Here are 6 things I wish someone had told 23-year-old me.
You’re not a bad person you just have untreated mental health issues and trauma- 23-year-old me could have really benefited from someone pointing out that the neglect and abuse I experienced as a child were not my fault and that the coping mechanisms I used to navigate my childhood had done their job-they had helped me survived but they were no longer necessary. In fact, holding onto these coping mechanisms would just end up causing me needless suffering.
DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) is amazing, try to get access to it.- Honestly, this was a failure on the part of the therapists and counselors in my life at the time, who didn’t tell me about DBT or help me to find access to it. DBT has been around since the late 70s and early 80s, however, it is often expensive and inaccessible. To be sure, the online version I take may not have been available when I was 23, but there may have been a sliding scale option that I could have taken advantage of. One of the things that break my heart for 23-year-old Naiomi, is all the needless suffering I went through not knowing that there was help available. Sure, I would have still gone through difficult times, because that is the nature of life. But sometimes I think about the person I could have been had I gotten timely mental health treatment
Go to seminary but skip out on the other degrees- I firmly maintain that going to seminary was one of the best decisions I have ever made. I loved the professors, I loved most of my classmates, and I loved learning. I do not regret getting my MDiv. My other degrees-were not as beneficial. I didn’t need them and they ultimately saddled me with student loan debt that I will pay off for the rest of my life. I especially wished I had skipped out on my history degree. The environment in the history program I was in was toxic. The department cultivated a climate of bullying not only between students, but between professors and students, and even between professors. When I say that my time in the history program was a nightmare, I mean it. Sure I learned a lot academically but it was not worth the bullying I experienced. I deserved better.
My opinions matters- Now let me be clear, 23-year-old me, needed to learn that in many cases there are ways to articulate one’s opinion without being a jerk. Being opinionated and being a jerk, are not necessarily the same thing. I think part of the reason why I confused aggressiveness with being opinionated is because I grew up being told that my opinions didn’t matter. In my childhood and young adulthood, I always felt as if I were on the defensive. That the only way my views and opinions would be taken seriously was if I could forcefully and aggressively share them. I believed that people who disagreed with me, in fact thought my opinions were worthless. But now, I realize, that my opinions actually do hold weight. They matter. I don’t need to prove their worth. The fact that other people may disagree, does not in fact invalidate my thoughts and beliefs. It just means, other people see certain subjects differently.
God loves me beyond what I can imagine- By the time I was 23 years old, I was 6 years removed from Fundamentalist Christianity. And while I had rejected some of the core fundamentalist theologies such as the infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible, the existence of hell, creationism, penal substitutionary atonement, and queerness being an abomination to God, I still struggled with my sense of self-worth. Fundamentalism often emphasizes how sinful and unworthy of love humans are. I had internalized that belief and it has taken years for me to not only intellectually reject that idea, but to fully believe that God loves and delights in me. I am not a disappointment to God.
It’s ok to not have everything figured out-most adults don’t. To be honest, this is a truth I still struggle with holding onto. 23-year-old me and now 33-year-old me, both have in common a love of planning and a need to know what’s next. I think that’s one reason I stayed in academia so long: it had a list of requirements, proposed timelines, and academia thrives on long-term planning. But the reality is that life happens. Often times plans go awry, and it’s not always because of something we did wrong. I used to think that people in their 30s and 40s had their lives all put together and while there certainly are some people who have had a plan for their lives and have stuck to it, most of us have found ourselves forced to adapt. Most of us have perhaps found ourselves veering off into paths that we never imagined and that’s ok.
Ways to Celebrate my Birthday with me:
1. Buy me a drink or food! Venmo: @ naiomi-gonzalez Paypal: Naiomigonzalez02@gmail.com (please note the spelling of my name)
2. Send me a happy birthday message
3. Comment one thing that you appreciate about my posts!
4. Invite others who you think would enjoy my writing to sign up for this substack!