Sunday Sundries: Life, Lately

Oh heyyyy it's Sunday again! I'm probably at work as you're reading this because I make very bad life choices (like agreeing to work for money. Madness.) and THAT is pretty much how my life is going lately. I think I have probably worked more (for money, anyway) this February than maybe any other month in my life which on the one hand is like 'yay money!' and on the other is like 'oh... That's all the money?' because, I may have mentioned before, my job is not very good.

ANYWAY. I shall stop there LEST I write about my job on the internet and somehow get in trouble for it (plus yesterday we got free donuts and diet coke and prosecco so who am I to complain?) but it just feels like when it comes to recapping my life lately I'm just constantly saying 'yeah I worked a lot and on my days off I was tired so didn't do stuff'. BASICALLY I need some more excitement in my life, and if anyone knows how to get that without spending very much money then I am all ears.

So instead of talking about my week (summary: work, new glasses, weird weird sickness on Thursday that was terrible, the donut thing) let me talk to you about a revelation I've been having about life since last June and which is still ongoing in the sense of actually, properly, trying to apply this new knowledge to my life to make an actual difference to it. I know I'm not really making any sense here, so let me start from the beginning.

Last June I went out with this chef guy (he's not the part of this worth talking about, ya know what I mean?) and during a gay old time at London Zoo I was saying that I found his chef skills pretty impressive (flirting, innit) and how I can't really cook amazingly, and he kind of shrugged and said "it's just repetition, really".

It's just repetition.

It's.

Just.

Repetition.

Here's something you should know about me. I'm a pretty smart person, which I say not to brag but to later criticise myself. School was never really a struggle for me because I just kind of got it- I could learn the stuff and write the stuff and exams weren't really that stressful for me. I was always kind of just good at school stuff without even trying, and even as I'm writing this I know how much of a dick I'm sounding. But bear with me because I'm about to get to my point.

There are some things I've struggled with doing in life. I'm not naturally good at exercise, so I've given up on it a lot. I'm not naturally good at languages, so instead of learning them I pretty much just give up on them. I wasn't immediately good at driving, so I stopped having lessons and, ya know, I walk everywhere (I actually don't mind this one). Because it hasn't been a struggle to learn a lot of things in life, when something is difficult for me, I just give up on it. I just hide behind 'not being naturally good' at something like that means I can't actually do it, when in fact: it's just repetition.

Repetition doesn't come naturally to me. I'm not good at telling the same story twice because I get bored (genuinely. If I want people to know something I'll just tell one person and let it circulate) and I'm no good at being bad at something. I get frustrated easily if something isn't easy to me, and because I'm also naturally lazy (I really am) that means I give up. This is all a revelation to me because until that guy said 'it's just repetition' it was honestly like I didn't understand that if you just keep on doing something you get better at it. I was operating more on the idea that if I'm not immediately good at something then I never will be, so what's the point?

And I honestly feel like I get the point now! That one little comment sparked a whole brain revolution that has made me see that if you just do something A LOT then you'll naturally get better at it because how could you not? I try to apply it to everything I do now, good or bad, because run didn't go well? Do it more and you'll get better. You don't understand this paragraph? Read it again and see what happens. I'm trying to learn Japanese, and even though I feel like nothing is really sticking in my brain* and I feel like I'm really bad at it, I'm sticking with it because IT'S. JUST. REPETITION. Regardless of how long it takes to learn, repetition is what it is.

So there you have it. This guy definitely has no idea that he set a bit of a revolution off in my brain, but I honestly feel like I've uncovered my biggest weakness and I'm actively trying to change the way I think about learning and doing new things. I can't pretend that it's an easy thing to do, and more often than not laziness wins ('but why don't I just naturally know all Japanese? That's not fair!') but trying is all I can ask of myself and that's what I'm doing. BOOM life changes and all that.

*Seriously, do you know how hard Japanese is? You need to learn a whole new alphabet, plus the sounds that the symbols make, PLUS what those sounds mean in English and omfg