If you told me this would be me, I wouldn’t have believed you

If you told me 20 years ago that I would be doing this, I would have thought you were crazy.

1. writing for substack, writing anything for the public in general - I use to believe I was horrible at writing until about 5 years ago.

2. being able to read science papers and understand them, and this might surprise you considering that I hold Master of Science, but I really was insecure around papers and it was torture for me to read them when I was in colledge. Now, 12 years out of school and it is the most natural and easy thing for me. I guess practice and acquired knowledge helped.

3. listening to metal music - the highschool me claimed I could never because who can understand all that yelling, but now I have a bunch of concerts under my belts and Motionless in White is on shuffle when I’m exhausted. I guess sometimes we got to give things a chance.

4. running and loving it. As someone who could ride the bike kilometers at a time and did karate for years, I was convinced that running is not for me, and now I can see that I simply had too high expectations for how that running should look. Nowadays I really enjoy running and I find it to be the best stress relief ever!

5. walking around with my natural, unstyled hair. I mean, I don’t need to tell you more do I?

6. eating beats - it used to be my nightmare because my mom used to push it on us as kids and I couldn’t stand the smell! But just recently, I started eating them. Allegedly, my mother was right - they are good for veins and blood.

7. not covering up my freckles - as a teen I was really angry that I had them, and now I have embraced them and I think they make my face very unique - they are my tiger stripes!

8. not disliking my belly. I would have never believed you this one, and yet it was me myself who made the change on purpose - it is no accident.

9. breaking rules - yeah, sometimes when rules make no sense even this “do everything right” human breaks the rules, but do not tell my mother! Although I think she might already know….

10. being fine with how much my body weights. This was a lot of learning and unlearning but it was also a decision I made - I wanted to accept myself, which to me 20 years ago would have never made sense.

Now, this was super fun for me!

I hope you liked reading it and I hope you do one of these lists yourself. It is very interesting to see how far we’ve come.