The dealt cards

While reading listen to:

The last warm summer rays are grazing Koper, leaving it in the beautiful anticipation of autumn cold. As I am biking to my morning class, I am painfully aware that this is the last semester I get to spend in this Italian-like coastal town that has transformed me in more ways than I can possibly imagine.

Life has been loving me lately. Like flipping a switch, it was suddenly flooded with golden moments. The days are packed with excitement, warm colours of people, stories that will be told to grandchildren, and those that will never leave the mouths of my close friends. My camera roll is filled with photos that warm my heart; this summer, I made a lot of forever kind of memories.

Yet here I sit in my cozy little apartment, feeling blue. This is where I got confused.

My life is flowing; I love where I currently stand and where I am going. So then, why do I feel this constant tightness and fear inside of me?

I am in a cramp, and it is squeezing my ability to fully breathe. As a result, I constantly look over my shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"Hello, are you Marjeta?" will a grim, nasal voice ask me one day.

"Yes, that's me."

And the person that has been secretly following me around for the last five months will inform me: "Your period of happiness is over. Next week your subscription ends and I just wanted to inform you a disaster is coming."

Writing this down feels silly, but honestly, I am constantly waiting for someone to drop a bomb on me.

I am on edge, unable to relax in my happiness and bask in the warmth of this simple joyful life I have been living lately.

One of my first classes this semester was a Positive psychology course. And a story that the professor told us stuck with me.

Long story short, his son had a problem with math from the beginning of time. One of his primary school teachers even told him that it was pointless for him to try because he would never be good at it. In psychology, we call this conditioning; a belief shaping your reality. In this case, he never got more than a 3 on a test. But faith would have it that he was failing the math class in his junior year. His solution was a tutor. In the first lesson, the tutor told him: "You are great at math, just very sloppy." So he studied and took the exam, hoping he would pass it. The day came when his professor walked into the classroom with a stack of tests. He would usually distribute them from the worst to the best grade in the class. Our student anxiously waited for the 1s to pass, and when they did, he was ecstatic. He made it!

But then a funny thing happened. The 2s were distributed, and then the 3s. Still, he didn't hear his name. His mind began spiralling. What If he did so poorly that he automatically failed? What if his test was lost, and he would have to do it all again? What If he sucked so bad his test wasn't even in a pile? The scenarios in his head turned to a dramatic horror, making it impossible for him to feel pride and joy. When his name was finally called, he wabbled to the front of the class, where a test with a big red 5 was pushed into his hand.

And here I am. Life has been good to me lately, and I am just not used to it. I love what I do, I am healthy mentally and physically, and I feel like I am working for my future and figuring myself out. Life has been trying to deal me the good cards, the 5s, and here I am, waiting for 2s and 3s. And in the meantime, my mind is panicking. Questioning and analyzing. Where is the other shoe, the bomb? Where is the catch?

And suddenly, the other shoe drops on my bike ride to my morning class, and all of it makes sense. It is me. My ability to trust that good things can and will happen to me and that I can create anything I desire and secretly wish. That work can be fulfilling and my day-to-day life enticing. It is reshaping all the beliefs I had been taught through life from my family, media, school, friends...

I have worked hard for the life I am living now. I sat by the table and ground my numbers so that I could get a five when the results came in. I was working on myself, but my mind is still stuck on beliefs I was unable to let go of. This realization was a bomb that I had been awaiting. My experiences and knowledge of the past made this anxious feeling in my bones spread up to my head, so when I was relaxing in Malta with a cup of freshly brewed coffee, I was questioning when the bad thing would happen. Or when two months later, I was walking Stockholm, I was thinking If I am doing enough to deserve all of this.

In my anxiety, I have been searching for bad things, picking them out of the ordinary and filling them with the air of my messy thoughts till my balloon exploded and hit me in the face.

The truth is, the thing you focus on grows. If I constantly focus on my fear, Is this as good as it will get?, then this here at this moment, it is as good as it is gonna get. The fear will disable the positive moments to be fully resent around me and in me. In return, it will fill my head with fear and worry that I will later feel in my body as tightness, fear and fatigue.

This summer was truly a dream, a taste of freedom in a moving car that took my friends and me to adventures I would never have imagined. These months evolved my character, strength, and senses. And it is finally time for my mind to follow.

There is no other shoe to drop, no bomb, no stranger secretly following me around. It is me creating what I focus on. And I choose to focus on the good.

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