Dera's Diary

Good evening, I know school is coming back pretty soon and while I will not quite talk about preparing for that in this post, I do encourage you all to make the time this weekend or this coming week to rest and plan out your goals for this term. So yesterday I was thinking about my hair. I has just loosened it and made a style that we call 'all back'. As I made it and looked in the mirror, admiring the perfection of my work (I'm even getting tired of myself at this point ;)) I remembered how much I had hated this style when I was younger. I basically thought it was ugly and should only be done as a last resort. The first time I made it in my recent life, I was looking for something that would be really easy to loosen in the coming days and when my friend made it, I realised that not only did I not hate it anymore, I actually quite liked it. Now my brother isn't really a fan, but then he struggles with just helping me do basic stuff like parting my hair so I'd sa...

Hello world, Recently I have been doing a lot of babysitting, and it has made me appreciate the privilege I have had all my life by having siblings that are all pretty close to my age. I'm learning that consistency and patience are all prety big themes, but I'd be lying if I didn't say it was so very exhausting. Kudos to all those who've been doing this for years! I was really struggling to find what to write about today and ended up doing what I always do when I'm lacking in inspiration.... look through my notes. Today's nugget of wisdom comes from June 6 - 'All change must be preceded by recognition'. I got this from a sermon and the pastor was saying that before you can change anything, you have to recognise that something needs to be changed. I think that's part of the reason why you can't really change for someone else. Because unless you see and acknowledge what needs to be adjusted, your 'change' will be shorlived and incomplet...

Good evening world, I spent some time trying to think of what to write and it came to me through a song (I'm so poetic, I know ;)) Party 'cause you know the future's all yours Dance till your feet don't touch the floor Celebrate the day you've waited for Party like you're ready for so much more Do it like you know it's never been done Go a little crazy, have too much fun Today's the day, come on everyone The party's just begun (This is a Cheetah girl song called 'Party has just begun'. If you don't know it, go renew your childhood.) Why did this song lead to a blog post some might ask? I recently started watching grownish again which is a show based on a girl who just moves into college and today I spent quite some time doing uni-related work. And what I've realised is that we get so caught up in all the hard stuff that we forget that this is an exciting time. Uni is the first time we're going to be adults in school (for ...

Hello…. How’s everyone doing? I hope we’re all good. August is such a great month… I don’t know, it feels like the peak of summer. And even though my summer this year is spent away from home and studying for an exam… I can’t help but be infected by summer joy. I’m trying to convince myself to get out of the house more often (it’s still a work in progress) and do other stuff so my entire day isn’t just spent studying (cause that would be really sad), but even though I find myself a bit too lazy to do stuff most of the time, I’m excited to even have the time to do it. At the beginning of my summer when I was trying to catch up on school work, I had to remind myself that I was on break. So even though I want to catch up on school work and prep for my upcoming exams, I also want to sleep in the middle of the day, workout at crazy hours, binge series over the weekend and dress as unkempt as I please (not joking:)). And this is your reminder that you need balance in your life. So priorit...

Good evening friends, I was really tempted to not write this week seeing as I just returned from two weeks of grueling summer school, but I was filled with inspiration and decided to share. Despite how exhausted we all got really fast, summer school was amazing. I went specifically for medicine, but there were students there for other subjects as well. We had afternoon and evening activities with my favourites being the talent show night (I sang in public for the first time in like a year and was legit shaking the whole time which was weird cause I normally don't have stage fright... but there's a first time for everything!), the walking tour of Cambridge (the tour guide was so good at her job), the Scavenger hunt (that only happened for like five minutes because we got caught in rain and hail outside), movie night ('the trial of the chicago 7' is sooo good) and sports day (my team won nothing, but I got a medal for my effort!). But I actually enjoyed the classes the ...

Hello world, It has been one crazy intense week of summer school. I have classes, basically want to be alone for lunch, have classes and then socialise with evening activities. I have fun but am totally knackered by the end of the day. That whole wanting to be alone thing is something I have noticed quite a bit this last week. Sometimes I wish I was more outgoing in the area of talking to people, but then sometimes I am with people and I just don't want to be. Here I can't really go anywhere alone, whcih I completely understand. But that somemes means I have to go places I don't really want to and it's hard too gauge who will want to go where because I don't really know anyone that well. But what I am trying to teach myself is to find a balance between not feeling the need to do stuff just so I can say I did and getting a healthy amount of social interaction. I will probably continue to have my lunches alone (just because that time also serves as the regeneratio...

Hello everyone, I hope we're all doing good. I heard a really amazing message on Sunday. It was talking about how sometimes, we've made agreements with the devil and sometimes, that is the reason why we can't move forward no matter how hard we try. Think about anxiety, or maybe even better, stress. I think it's very possible that we are a generation of people that have become so accustomed to stress that peace feels weird and foreign. I know I've definitely felt that way. Not because I want to be stressed. But when I am finally stress free, I feel guilty as though it's a bad thing. And this might not be the case every time, but Steven Furtick said it right when he suggested that sometimes we enter self pity mode, or stress mode because we think that if we welcome or cause the problem, then the effect will be less than if we were attacked; we think it'll take the pressure off. Its like when we expect the worst to avoid being disappointed. We stress and we...