Dera's Diary

Hello everyone, How's life on your side doing? On mine, COVID has delivered yet another striking blow. Not that this is new or uncharacteristic of COVID; but somehow I manage to be surprised every time. The end of the year is coming and to make sure that all the international boarders can go home, my school is giving people the option of isolating for the rest of the term. I am not going back home this summer because both the UK and my home country have decided to make it extremely difficult for me... so I am not really included in the bracket of people that can isolate. I completely understand why people that are going home would want to isolate, but I can't help but feel a bit sad at the fact that once again COVID is low-key destroying the end of the term. It's easy for me to wish for extremes when all I can do is wish for them, but I do wish that COVID would just end already. I'm getting exhausted with all the it's-getting-betters followed by it's-getting...

Hello, I had a pretty interesting conversation with one of my friends last night. I cherish these conversations with her because they are the few times that I feel I am able to actually talk about things. I know that a lot of situations and topics are complex and personal and I won’t pretend to understand the full extent of them. But I find it so sad that we are unwilling to hear each other out, with even the simple things. We are so insistent on having our way, on being right, we can not give each other the courtesy of listening. I’m definitely not perfect, but I’m working on intentionally giving people the chance to breathe. If I really think I believe the right thing, then attacking the other person isn’t going to help them understand. In the same way, if I’m having the conversation just to hear an opposing view, cutting the person off will not let give them the chance to express their opposing beliefs fully. I know that these self expressions can be offensive at times and I can...

Hello world, Welcome to June!!! This week, I was reminded of an intresting observation I've made about people in the last year. We are obsessed with control and certainty. Now this isn't always shown in obvious, arrogant ways. Sometimes it's simple and unconscious, hiding behind the things we say and believe. One of the major things that made me feel this way was the way I noticed people use 'objectivity', 'facts', 'logic' and 'reasonable'. Although all these words (for some reason that's beyond me) carry with them a degree of trustworthiness... sometimes, the things we consider as objective or logical just don't make sense... to me anyway. Sometimes we say we just want the facts, but then when we get the facts we don't consider them because we don't want to believe the subject at hand. And some other times we don't have facts and we can only believe what we're being told and we discard such motions as being illogi...

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...