Age 26 - The Retrospective

As people who know me quite well will know, I’ve spent quite a bit of the last year or so of my life going through a period of introspection – a retrospective, if you like (although I’ve not quite got 3 columns of what’s gone well, what’s gone not so well and what I need to improve!). This week I realised that I’m actually at the happiest I’ve been in quite a long time – it was my birthday, I got offered a permanent job (and a promotion) at work and am well on my way towards my weight loss goal amongst other things! I thought it was a time to reflect again, write something and reflect on where I am so far – so here we are!

At the end of 2011 I left a pretty serious long-term relationship and it turned out that the grass wasn’t really that much greener on the other side after all. So after the resulting low, I started trying to figure out how to pick myself back up and I put together a life plan – a set of objectives and actions (and then put them on Trello – it’s satisfying to move things to the Done column).

Now, one of my good friends Ian:http://cubicgarden.com/, who’s been described as a Wikipedia of dating, has helped me with this process, and although the purpose of my retrospection wasn’t really around dating (although that was a part of it – I wanted to figure out exactly what I wanted), a lot of advice around dating is actually just self-help, particularly around self-confidence. A lot of the things that are covered in dating advice books and those communities, is around an area called “inner game” – that basically boils down to self-confidence. A lot of the other bits of advice from those kind of communities are to be taken which a pinch of salt (to say the least, it can be full-on misogyny at times), but GirlOnTheNet says it better than I ever could, in that a lot of the advice from the pick up community is basically just self-confidence, and then going and talking to women).

Ian and I have different views on some aspects of dating, and although his advice has forced me to push boundaries, I’m not trying to emulate his approach exactly, as we’ve got different personalities and experiences (which is fine – there’s not one single approach to dating which works for everyone), but I have been on more dates, of which the majority have been good dates, and I’ve managed to figure out what I’m looking for as well – which is definitely something that I struggled with a year ago, and not knowing that left my paralysed at times.

I now have my own home, which I’ve made into a good reflection of me and my personality, I’ve started dressing better, but again into a way that’s a good reflection of my personality, I’ve started rowing, which has immensely boosted my level of happiness in my physical self, and I’ve now got a network of good, local, friends around me – which is something I’d found difficult to have for a while, largely as a result of moving city on average every 12 months for the past 5 years. I’m really happy with my job, and that’s been the strong foundation which all my other confidences has grown from. There are still aspects I want to work on – I’m still overweight, I drink too much and get too loud when I’m drunk, and there are still quite a few areas of my life I wish I had more confidence about – but from where I was 12 months ago, I feel a large difference, and I just wanted to capture that.