New Year, New Genie
First off, I want to thank everyone who has been reading this blog so far.
This marks Blog #13, one blog entry consistently published every month since the start of 2022 (woohoo!).
I want to especially thank all of you who reached out with really amazing, heartfelt messages, sending your love, your encouragement, sharing your own stories and personal struggles with me, lending a listening ear, and overall just holding space.
A Good Year
2022 was not an easy year for me.
It was a year marked by loss, heartbreak, burnout, hopelessness… the list goes on.
It was a year of change.
The world opening up, and life speeding up so fast all of a sudden.
I’ll be honest with you. The past two years of covid lockdowns and isolation was good for me.
Or rather, I thrived in it.
And I know that I’m among a very small minority that this was the case for.
As an introvert, having more time by myself, with just a few people (family, friends id call), it was bliss. So much time for me to read, to write, to dance, to sit with myself, my thoughts, my emotions.
So in a large way, the opposite was true.
When things got better for most, I found it tough to adapt.
Layer on top of that the insane bloodbath in the crypto and stock markets, plus my whole ‘Leaving the Submarine force’ quiet-quitting path that I switched to this year.
I crumbled.
Now at the start of a new year, I look back and I see all these external challenges, these obstacles, and I realize that in getting ‘defeated’ by them, I also survived! And in some ways, I overcame them.
The size of your problems are an indicator for how much you have grown.
‘Judge a man for the size of his problems.’ - Genie
I would never imagine Eugene 5 years ago being able to go through any of this, and still make the decisions I did; still managing to accomplish all the things I did, in spite of everything.
Now that I have come out the other side of this depressive episode, I see the strength within myself to pull through. To endure.
Sure, plenty of mistakes were made along the way. Plenty of ways I could have fared better, treated others better, shown up better. But all is well.
Everything happened exactly the way they were meant to happen in order to bring us to where we are today. And this is exactly where we are supposed to be.
Growing Genie
This is the next iteration of the blog, and it is aligned to, well, the next iteration of me, Genie.
Growing Genie is a rebrand, a signal to myself and to you that things are changing. Growing.
Blog entries will now be:
shorter (3-5minute reads vs 6-10minute reads previously)
more frequent (once every 2 weeks vs once per month previously)
and more focused on sharing my personal growth journey.
In a way, by naming the blog as such, I prime myself to look at life through a different lens - how have I grown today? how did this event, this interaction, this person, help me to grow closer to my ideal self?
I’ve been passionate about personal growth - ‘self-help’ if you will - for nearly a decade now. I think I caught the personal growth bug from my mom, who is/was into this kind of stuff too - Tony Robbins, Adam Khoo, Steven Covey, Dale Carnegie, even the modern gurus like Gary Vee, Tim Ferris, Ali Abdaal, etc.
I realized it was possible to change yourself, your habits, your behaviours, your mannerisms, your character, to mold yourself into someone virtuous, someone motivated, someone intelligent, etc. as I saw example after example of people in my life who did it, and I've been inspired ever since.
It is a part of me that I truly love - knowing that I am growing, learning, building, every day, week, month, year.
And I want to share that with you!
Each one of us is charting our own unique path; this is simply the one I am walking on.
As I shared in my previous entry, a heavy, monthly blog, super raw and personal and vulnerable, sometimes to the point of being baggage-laden, has not been good for my own mental health. Focus = feeling, and rather than being a form of release, the public nature of the blogs instead locked me in negative feedback loops for longer than normal.
I know the blog has been good for you, though. Always so nice to hear how it has impacted you in one way or another.
And I know that the personal, vulnerable nature of the blog plays a big part in this connection. So don’t worry, I don’t intend to stop being authentic and open to sharing parts of my life not many would know.
But I will be more careful with doing it - it will not be to seek external validation, or to 'dump baggage' to fish for attention, but to simply document my life, check my own thinking patterns and improve on my emotional awareness.
I suppose you can help keep me accountable too! Call me out if I seem to be going down a dark and/or dangerous path.
In with the New
So yup, that's it for this blog entry - I know its not the most content-rich entry, but it serves as a transition from the old to the new, I suppose.
I promise there's some seriously good stuff coming soon! some teasers:
2 books that changed my life in 2022
my manifesto for future relationships
why I left the Catholic Church
making my own guided meditation track
writing my own Bible
my all-in-one system for journaling, habit tracking and documenting my life
If these intrigue you, why not do me a solid and hit subscribe!! Also helps you keep up with the posts, since on social media the updates go away quickly to make room for the next piece of content on the feed. At least here, we have a protected space for ~quality stuff~
See you in 2 weeks!
- Genie