“Maybe for this semester, I should get good grades, and maintain an exercise routine, and oh, earn a language certificate too,” goes the same old pledge every semester. And maybe you, who picked up this magazine, will have said the same things? We always set the same goals – just to be disappointed with ourselves for failing again. It might be a worry in advance, but why can we never just reach the self we want?

We are never satisfied with who we are, imposing high standards and then ending up disappointed we couldn’t meet them. I know that I was desperate to coincide myself with my ideals. So I pushed myself to meet all the, nearly impossible, standards and expectations, to resemble someone else I envy. And that was where the endless sense of emptiness and frustration came from. I rushed all around and crowned myself with every persona that looked good, but finding the standard from others took me nowhere near satisfaction. Every life other than mine looked like heaven to me, making mine feel like nothing but travesty; a total ‘pandemonium.’

To share my one hindsight that I found after going that far; you don’t have to get all the experiences and achievements you envisioned (which others seemed so gorgeous in), to be your perfect, or even your true, self. Your baseline of life must be who you are in the moment, and the one thing you need to do is to accept yourself. It is often said that ‘life is a journey’, whose purpose is to enjoy and then return to the very point you started. The end of your long adventure that lies ahead must be in living faithfully in your own shoes.

I hope we could make this semester a fresh start to acknowledge and embrace who we are, rather than loosing ourselves to disappointment in the end. Trust me, you’ll find yourself quite better off than you thought. Good luck!