Driving

Being home is tough.

The change in environments is making it easy for me to fall back to old habits, to regress from progress I feel I have made. I don't want to go back to how things used to be, but since I have been home (a whopping four days, so far), I feel a lot of the concerns I used to have and am constantly struggling with the things I have been struggling with the past couple of years.

Maybe its due to the free, idle time I have. I am not bombarded with miscellaneous school related tasks that I was mere days ago. If you ask anyone, I am one to have a hard time relaxing and really enjoying time off. I am the type to get antsy if I am not doing something productive. I am also not constantly around the friends I love so dearly, the ones that I am so used to walking 5 minutes to see. I am grateful for my family that I miss, don't get me wrong. But we are all doing our own thing, its the holidays you know, and its all a little hectic at my home.

Having said all this, I am left to resort to old struggles. I feel I am doing okay managing these struggles, but I am still confronted with them daily, and its nothing that I am overly happy about. These daily encounters, with enough excess, tend to pile up and over time can get me down. I gotta stay positive, because that's what I know how to do, but I get mixed results.

I was thinking in the car today, on the drive home from an errand, that maybe, I should be focusing on actively, and I mean actively times 100, reminding myself of a few things daily. While driving, I made this list, on the notepad of my mind:

1. Acknowledge what you value in others, in loved ones, in friends, in others. 

Think about it daily, focusing one person at a time.

When done, remind myself to hold myself to those values.

Just as I hold all my people, friends or strangers, to the same standard, 

so should I hold myself to that standard.

It is in this way that I value, love, and see myself the way my peers and my family do.

2. Remind myself that there is more inside of me than skin and bones.

Like a transformer, there is more to me than meets the eye.

Remind myself that though my physicality is what is seen,

there is a whole world of person and whole lot more to me, to Nikko, that lies beneath it all.

3. Remind myself to get out of myself daily. 

This one is tough for me. 

Being a naturally reflective person, I am constantly thinking 

and connected with my feelings.

But by "getting out of myself," and putting my energy towards

something else, or even better someone else,

that is energy better spent. 

It is a more rewarding way to spend my time, too.

 I think if I can really work hard to remind myself of these things daily, I can work to not let myself fall back to old habits, to old ways of thinking, especially habits and ways that I cannot afford to fall back to. Its really tough to do, but if it was easy it wouldn't be a struggle, and its all about the journey, not the destination.