An Open Letter to MYSELF

An Open Letter to MYSELF !!

From 25 year old me to 50 year old me.
Hi Jaini,

This obviously applies If I am still alive and reading it.

WOW you made it. You went through all these years and made it to your half century. Consider yourself a lucky women. And if you have relatively good health, a roof, a fridge full of food and a family to love you just proved that you made it through the rough times. Maybe when you are reading this at 50 you may be laughing and saying to yourself what was I thinking writing this letter to myself. Life must be completely different for you right now, you probably don’t remember how you were when you were 25, and so let me take you down to a journey to your twenties. Your early twenties were tough, maybe not compared to what you must have seen so far but they were the toughest you had seen thus far.

At 22 you graduated from your bachelors, big deal. But it all came crumpling down when you couldn’t land a job in the next coming months. You worked minimum paid job, cleaned shit of clients and got punched and knives thrown at you. But hey, you took it as a challenge and understood that if you are going to be a behaviour analyst you got to take the shit. You came out of that and then you landed your first professional job but the only problem was it was thousands of miles away from family. For someone who had never travelled alone, to move to a foreign land without any support at such an age is tough. It meant to leave behind the only family that you had, the few people you loved, your friends behind, and the place you called home from the past ten years. It was probably the toughest decision you had to make at that point in life but you had promised yourself that no matter what the obstacle you will take it to make it big in your career. When you got to the foreign land, everything changed from your weather, to your comfort, your peers and your lifestyle. You were sleeping on the bare floor with just a blanket for 6 months, you were travelling in -55 degree Celsius on the bus waiting outside for it sometimes to a stretch of an hour. The only one to call friend was your phone and the television. You went to the theatre on your own on your bday to celebrate it. You finally realized what it meant for thousands of people when they migrated to different places to better their lives, just like your parents did, to give you the life you have. The distance between your parents and you made you even closer. The friends you took for granted to be around all of sudden became the greatest gift.

Apart from the obvious hardships, you also realized that the career wasn’t for you. You liked the bits and pieces of the career but you weren’t truly living your potential and you decided to go back to family and figure yourself out. This was the exciting part, being reunited with the ones you love. But you didn’t know that you were about to embark on the worst year so far. You got back with a hope to further your study, and meanwhile continuing working towards slowly shifting your career. Trying to change your career is never an easy route. You must have applied to hundreds of jobs, oh how dreadful that was. You didn’t even get a response, let alone rejections. You had set out goals for yourself, and you were getting disappointed as days passed by without any of them being even close to completion.

Tired and frustrated you started lashing on the same people that you claimed to love so much. But as someone who had been in the field of psychology for so long you knew that the changes were happening and to deal with it you started a completely different course. You had nothing to do with it, but you knew that while you searched for jobs and applied for masters you had to do something or else you would definitely go crazy. This new course gave you a sense of achievement because you were able to meet people from different walks of life and having passed through the same troubles as you were. You didn’t feel as distraught as you had before because you found that you were not alone. As you are writing this you are coming to an end of this course, and you have finished applying for masters, and you are working part time with an offer waiting for you once you graduate that may lead you to your desired career path.

This was just the beginning of your career and now on to your personal life. Being from an Indian descent you knew early on that if you didn’t find yourself a partner someone else for sure will. I am sure you remember ALL the pieces of art work you had to meet and go through before you landed on the one you did (I hope you have someone, If not I guess all of them turned out to be pieces of abstract art work). It was hard for you to have a current mind set where you wanted to know someone for a long time, fall in love and then get married as supposed to your parents wanting you to meet three times and boom you are engaged. You constantly had to fight with them to make them come in the middle. You met some really amazing guys who were perfect for you theoretically but god damn it they did nothing for your heart to pump. Then you met some that my god all everything was just red flags but you were swooned by them temporarily. And then there were ones that everything was perfect but the time just didn’t work out. You were getting frustrated with this process as time lapsed, pressure built and “biological” clock started kicking. But one day you realized that hey who the hell cares. When it is meant to happen it will. Keep meeting the douchebags, the bad boys , the nerds, the commitment phobic, the creeps, but one day if it’s meant to work out you will end up with your own weirdo that fits in with your weird life and you shall call it a true find ;).

This was your life at 25. I don’t know if your life is any better now, but what the 25 year old Jaini had figured out was that no matter what happened in her life, she had her family and her friends right where she wanted them. She had her confidence that she will do ok, everything will be fine just as the bad times came so will the good. She learnt that the greatest gift of time is letting go.



So if you are stressing right now, let it go. Live and enjoy what you have right now. The clock will turn around and you will find happiness, and if you are really happy right now enjoy it to the utmost gratefulness.



And more than anything keep respecting yourself, and love yourself.

Your own reflection,

Jaini from 2015