Like Fine Wine

It's my last year in my teens. 19 doesn't hold as much value of celebration like turning 1, 5, 10, 16, 18 & 21 etc where you find yourself at a milestone. I turned 19 where I found myself, horrified and gaping in at the reflection of my youthful hands latching onto my first grey hair! I tried convincing myself for a good five minutes that it was the reflection of the light and that there was no need to stress over it. Then I realised it was probably me being stressed that spawned the little forker, and now being at my big age I must find ways not to stress, which is stressful enough because I don't want to be stressed and cause more grey hairs and wrinkles... and more stress.

At this rate, I'll be ageing like a grape left out in whatever heatwave that was a while ago instead of fine wine, and I quite like my Rosé. Anyways, I said I didn't want to be stressed, so I'll leave that there and on to the agenda of taking up five minutes of your time.

The older you get, the more you appreciate everything in your life: good or bad. Everything, everyone, every opportunity that flows through your life as a blessing or a lesson. Even grey hairs. *sighs* God knows, I'm not perfect, and I have no intention to be. We get so caught up in the realm of our imperfection, flaws and insecurities that we try and hide it by trying to prove to everyone else that you don't care that you have all these impurities, and well, stains. That's how we see ourselves, right? A blank sheet filled with stains from trauma, hurt, self-loathing, regret etc and we try so hard to scrub those stains with whatever we can manipulate into our lives. (Metaphorically of course) You use drugs, alcohol, sex, binge eating, binge-watching, self-pity, isolation, anger to try and scrub away at these stains but by the time you've realised, you had only made the stains worse. Then that turns you back to all the other things to distract yourself. Before you know it, you're in the shower, in the club, your car, work, whichever one your sad, pathetic self relates to - bawling your eyes out.

Then the more your skin pruned, and the eye bags no longer disappear behind the concealer, to start to reflect on how you should have set up your pensions with the most benefit - wait, wrong thing. You start to ponder how you didn't do the things you wanted to do. A lot of people enter their 'midlife' crisis or acting out in an age period people think are inappropriate, or *whispers* 'too late' and I came to think to myself: I've had way too many pre-life crisis's, Many of which could have been prevented or avoided had I stopped being a little shish (kabob). *sips drink quietly* Then it hit me while I was trying to access my inner 'Kanye loves Kanye' while listening to FML. To be completely fair, life will always knock you down some way or another, so why are you letting you, YOU, get you down? If I could rush my teenage self, I would, one big backhand to knock some senses into me, (might take a few more, to be honest). How can you have 99 problems, and you're one? Make it make sense, please. The lyrics clearly say, 'I have 99 problems and a...' well you wouldn't get it since you're acting like the problem you shouldn't have. Oh, I'm stepping on some toes. I think I have to left feet when I try and dance around topics, (Get it... hehe, yeah, never mind). Sometimes, you're your own problem, your enemy in the way of getting in the middle of your life.

No matter how much you try to get rid of your problems, like bacteria, there will always be that 0.1% to toxicity that remains, but how good would it feel if you realised that you are problematic, you are lazy, you have bad b.o. and yes, your hygiene is questionable, you can't sing, you can't cook, and you are facially challenged? Okay, maybe you won't feel that good, but self-awareness is key. You belong to you. As much as you want to show people that you have eight packs of abs... let's be honest: you were flexing, cutting off the oxygen to your brain for one photo that got swiped to the left quicker than Swiper trying my girl Dora. Calm down, Okay. It's okay to not be perfect. It's okay to not be happy all the time, it's okay to just be unapologetically you. What's so hard in that?

People.

People who don't know how to mind their own business. You're still messed up, and that's okay, you'll get over it in your own time. Your life isn't going anywhere, and you have nothing going on, you're broke, your skin not even glowing without the filters. It's okay, everyone has their own pace to go at, but don't sit there and mope around doing absolutely nothing about it. If you want to change a situation in your life, you sit down with your four-year-old self's imagination when you thought the moon was following you in the car and come up with some ideas of how to live with yourself. The story of your misfortunes can be of great value to someone else. If you thought you weren't special, wait until the day of your funeral when everyone seems to have great stories of you and fond memories - memories you're hearing for the first time too. I used to be so shy and reserved and that got me nowhere. The more I started caring less of what people would think of me, the more I realised how much the people I choose to hold hostage- surround yourself around, love me, sometimes more than me. Yeah, you have bad qualities about you, but the crazy thing about love is that it's unconditional. Do you love yourself? Unconditionally? Do you appreciate the good and bad qualities that you have yet to work on?

I came up with an analogy because that's how I interpret the world, I take scenarios and relate then to random things that make sense in my beautiful brain. Appreciating things in life is like setting an early alarm for the next day. But you stayed up all night, doing whatever it is that you know could wait till the next day. *psst* That series on Netflix, you can download offline, yeah, so there's no need to be chilling at booty call hours. Anyways, you either remember to set your alarm or you don't. The same way people plan things out in their lives, a goal to hit a milestone/ achievement, or just an alarm... The time comes for that alarm to go off, you hit snooze, you wake up, or you sleep through it. You see, when you create a habit of waking up a certain time, your body creates its own clock and wakes you up around the same time. The same way, when you get opportunities, setbacks, new challenges, you have the mentality to tackle head-on because you are aware of it, and you know that something needs to be done. Know explaining the hitting the snooze part. It's the lazy alternative. You hear the alarm, you know you need to get it, but it's easier if you just keep hitting that button instead of turning it off because you're not ready yet. How many times have we hit snooze in our lives because we're more half-baked than Ben and Jerry's ice cream?

In fact, you either manage to get out of bed, or you just don't, and you're late. Now onto sleeping through it. You've come to a point where you no longer care what happens, you're content being cosy in the environment you're in, so you sleep through it, you're late, your whole day gets worse until you repeat the cycle the next morning,

The same way we can savour those extra minutes when we wake up earlier than our alarm and then go back to sleep, we can savour the moment we're in right now. Society tells us we need to need to follow the yellow brick road home, walk down the same path everyone else did because that's how they got to where they are. Yes, it helps to have a destination, but how are you getting there? How are you making your way through life by carrying extra luggage you should have dropped a few relationships, friendships and mishaps back? The older you get, the more you appreciate and value your time, your own time, in your own happiness, in your own love for yourself. How long are you going waste nitpicking at your insecurities instead of overcoming them, and that's not to say you re to change yourself, it's to be more self-aware and loving your half-baked self unconditionally. I'll take my pruned grape self and create my own vinification of wine, or grape juice, whatever your fancy. (No, I'm not judging you for googling that word.)

When your next alarm rings, what are you going to do?