Dera's Diary

What a week it has been! From exams to trips to life... this last week has caught up with me. Life can be hard. There have been quite a few times when I've felt like situations I was involved in were spiralling out of control all around me and there was absolutely nothing I could do to gain any sense of peace. It almost seems like once I gain that peace in one aspect of my life, all hell breaks loose in another part. I guess life is just like that... it's a constant race where the reward for hard work is more work, and the reward for faith in one area is testing in another. I completely understand how easy it is to get tired of trying to make things work out or how exhausting it can be to keep trying when it feels like the people you're trying for don't recognise you or they can't see past the old you to who you are now. I get that it can be tempting to give up when you've given everything and gained nothing. I recognize that it is instinctive to back away whe

Hello, I have a couple of things to talk about today and I even knew what they'd be before I started writing... always a good sign. I was having a chat with my friend (like I always seem to be doing these days) about people in general and wanting to fit in. I was explaining how for the first time ever I did not feel the need to fit in with a certain group of people because I didn't want my identity to be tied to theirs. I know that sounds very deep, but it's really how I felt. It wasn't just a group of people particularly. I didn't want my identity to be tied to any person... I want to be known as Dera and I want my relationships to be just that, MY relationships. I won't and will never be best friends with everyone, but I do want my friendships to be based on a knowledege of me and not just my relationships with other people, even if that's where they start. Anyway... we started talking about teenagers and the general culture that we have around us. I w

Hello world! This week was a whirlwind. I woke up everyday and said 'it's almost Friday'. Good news is that Friday came eventually:)I want to talk a little about control and how it psychologically affects us. I might be very wrong and what I'm about to talk about might not psychological at all... if you happen to know psychology and you know this isn't psychology, please only expose me in private;) So I had a meeting I was really worried about for a while during this last week. I was anticipating every possible problem and that was really stressing me out. And then on the day of the meeting, I realised that I had done all I could do. I was worrying about things that I couldn't control because I had told myself that somehow, I had to control them. And I just couldn't. We're human.... we cannot control everything. So many of us wear ourselves out trying to be things and do things that we weren't made to be or do. We get down on ourselves when peopl

Hello everyone, Yesterday started off very calm and ended up being swamped with work. I hope this belated post is enjoyable😉 On this same Saturday, I went on a walk with my friend and she was telling me about these Robert Sapolski lectures she’d been watching about how we try to categorise things to make things easier on ourselves. I wasn’t really getting the full gist at the time, but later that night we were finishing ‘Shadow and Bone’ ( just in case you don’t know it, all you need to know is that Grisha and Grisha hunters don’t get along) and one of the lady’s friends came to ‘save’ her from this Grisha Hunter. Only problem was that she didn’t need to be saved; she and the Grisha Hunter had found common ground (and yes, fallen in love🙄😂). But her friend could not fathom the idea that the Grisha Hunter could’ve changed. He said and I quote "they don't change." I rememeber pausing the show, looking at my friend and saying that I never wanted to hate a group of p

Hello everyone, Happy new month!!! There are a couple of things that I was reminded of this week that I'd like to share. I hope you can relate to them in some way. 1. Hope is a risk: Being hopeful is a really risky investment of time. So many times I've been tempted (and I'm sure we've all been) not to get my hopes up to reduce the sting of disappointment. Since I have thought this way, I can definitely recognise the validity of this argument. If you expect too much, you open yourself up to more disappointment, but if you underestimate and underexpect, you're more likely to be surprised in a positive way. But if you didn't already guess it, I don't think constantly expecting the worst to prevent disappointment is the way to live life. Even if you get the job or role, if avoiding disappointment completely is the goal, then you won't even let yourself enjoy those things cause you're worried of what may happen. Personally, I think disappointment is