Dear me,

Stop waiting for your dreams to fall in your lap!  The world doesn’t owe you a thing.  You have to go and fight for what you want.  It won’t magically appear the first time, or the second, or the ones after that.  It will come when you are ready, which will be never – if you sit and complain.

Enough with the self-doubt – it’s getting pathetic.  It is an easy scapegoat, an easy way to avoid the real elephant in the room.  You don’t give yourself a chance.  You constantly assume that there is someone better, more qualified, more charismatic, yadda-yadda-yadda.  There isn’t!  Because they are sitting back, thinking the exact same thing about you.

Don’t pay lip service to the idea of getting up after you get knocked down.  Don’t kid yourself in thinking that ‘getting up’ after you have been knocked down means accepting what happened and moving on with it.  Don’t pat yourself on the back and say: “Well done!  You failed, but you learnt from it and can now move on!  I’ll be stronger for this!”  That is rubbish – how can you learn from it if you never put yourself back in the ring?

What good is getting up, if you don’t get back into the fight?  Failure will continue to dictate fate to you, until you step up and tackle it head-on.  If it was easy – it wouldn’t be worth it.  So take solace in that fact, truly understand it and the first step will be obvious.  Put yourself on the line again.  Get back in the ring again.  Wipe those tears out of your eyes, wipe the fear from your tongue and line up again.

Stop being so self-conscious.  Why do you care what people think anyway?  If their judgements mattered, then they would be where you want to be – because they would understand the game.  But are they?  Are they where you want to be?  No.

So why do you do what they do?  Why do you follow?

That’s the thing with a shadow, it will always be… a shadow.

Beat your own path and stick with it!  Hold fast to what you believe in and respect yourself enough to be honest about that.  You are not here to be mediocre, that’s easy.  It’s easy to make excuses, to avoid the real topic.  Cut that out!

You have what it takes, so take it for goodness’ sake.

Yours sincerely,

Me.