Blog #1 – Introduction – It All Comes Out In The Wash
I shouldn’t start off by being so self-deprecating, but I gotta admit: I hate writing. Ever since I can remember, I’ve had this belief that I “suck at it.” As a kid, I would avoid writing with the same passion that I avoided vegetables…and now, my doctor tells me I have a fatty liver, so I guess I should have done a bit more of both.
And so, in the spirit of this blog in general, I have decided to stop listening to the voice in my head telling me what I suck at and why I shouldn’t do things, and do them anyway.
Here I go:
So who am I? Honestly, I’m no one. My name is Nikhil Oberoi, and I was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, with some time spent in the riveting suburbs of Mississauga and Brampton. I’m good with numbers (spoiler alert: I’m Indian) and even better with sales and client relations. Other than that, I’m one of the laziest people you will meet, and I am sometimes clueless to the point where it’s embarrassing.
But that’s not the point. The point is: life is nothing like I thought it would be. If you told me at the beginning of 2022, I’d be a novice blogger in the third year of a pandemic (what’s a pandemic? I’d ask), I’d have laughed and continued whatever semi-boring task I was doing for work at the time. But life turned out way different than I thought (I didn’t befriend Drake by 25 and I still don’t own a villa in the south of France).
Instead, I am here on the internet to document my journey of life unknown. I’ve put behind what I expected, and putting myself in front of whats coming (but the scary thing is, who the fuck know what’s coming, lol). I hope that this experience brings me an opportunity to really take in my journey towards higher levels of inner peace and happiness.
I also hope that this creates a space for us to be LOSTAF so that we can start to learn ourselves and our reality better, so that our behaviour will stop being controlled by insecurities that we may or may not be conscious of.
Being out of school and on “the grind” has taught me that true success and happiness doesn’t come from a 50×150 lot and a pool in your backyard (although hey, #goals), and definitely doesn’t come from placing your happiness in someone else. In my opinion, true success comes from one simple question: Are you happy with the way you FEEL about yourself? I know I wasn’t. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the more I was accomplishing, the worse I felt inside.
It made me start to reflect: what the fuck?
I was really confused. Isn’t this what we were sold growing up? Get good grades, get into a good school, land that amazing job, make loads of money, get married, get that house, work your life away, and once you’re “successful”, then you will be happy. And if you’re not happy? Well, welcome to your “mid-life crisis”.
Well, fuck.
I think I speak for many when I say, I want to scream (to the sky? To the person who told me what I was supposed to care about?) “WHAT’S YOUR RETURN POLICY?”
If you try this method of begging out loud for a return policy, you’ll quickly learn that life doesn’t offer one. Everything here is final sale; and there is nothing worse than cluttering your life with useless stuff you don’t need.
Personally, I never thought I’d have to deal with my past if I just simply didn’t think about it. I’d just ignore it; seems simple enough, right? Instead, unknowingly, I was projecting outward and blaming others for the shitty ways I felt, distracting myself by chasing accomplishments, spending my money on distractions, and seeking people who supported my entitlement.
I was searching for more. I was getting more. And yet, I was getting further and further away from happiness.
Eventually, I realized I needed to change. I needed to admit that I was lost as literal fuck, and to surrender to not knowing what the point was. I was becoming increasingly more interested in healing modalities, and I started to actually work on myself. I realized that I would have to acknowledge my past and make peace with it if I wanted to live a life of actual fulfilment. I was ready to stop seeking happiness outside of myself, and start going inward. I wanted to know that if everything were to fall away, and I was left with just myself, I’d be okay.
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Look, maybe everyone already knows what I’m speaking about and I’m just fashionably late (except this time it’s not cool). It’s just, I relied on school to prepare for the “real world”, but school never taught me what it took to feel good about myself from within. But if there’s anything I’ve learned about life so far, it’s that people won’t remember you by the things you owned or the job position you had. They will remember you by the person you were, the way you made them feel, and the value you brought to their life; and if you can’t feel good about yourself, in the long run, it’s going to be hard for people to feel good around you.
One of my old high school teachers used to say “It all comes out in the wash”. I know people use this saying when talking about paying for coffee for a friend or whatever, but for me, it always struck a different cord.
Figuratively speaking, I think we all go through a “wash” in our life where our dirt confronts us in the face. When we face the dirt, we get soaked and drenched, and spun around with no control…But, as long as you are willing to do the laundry, you will always come out feeling warm and fluffy. All you’ve got to do is believe it to be true.