Blog - November 16, 2017

Day 16 : The November Happiness Challenge

We are reading from Maryam today . She is a witty writer who has done a lot of writing both professionally and for the fun of it.She has some gems to drop for us today and I’m all for it. She writes Hi, My name is Maryam Atoyebi and I am a designer, writer/visual storyteller. For the past two years I have created content for a reputable Nigerian website but like every typical millennial, I’ve felt disillusioned and my anxiety didn’t help matters. After spending one year at my job, I started feeling stuck and didn’t know where exactly in life I was headed. I stopped loving my job and started hating every waking moment that I had to resume at work. Seeing people do great things on social media didn’t help matters too. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE seeing young women do awesome things in spite of the many odds they face. But I felt useless because I thought I wasn’t contributing anything positive to the world. But guess what? I am doing that and I have been doing that since I started putting myself out there. Before the time of writing this article, I held back whenever I was presented with the opportunity of describing myself. I held back on so many things and even gave up when I realized things started becoming too hard. But Alhamdullilah, I have decided to take charge and change things around for myself. I decided to slowly discover myself and the things that made me happy or calm at least. I also did a lot of self-dragging (I had to face some hard painful truths about myself in order to be better at my job and life. One important thing I am learning from this journey is that If I weren’t afraid or anxious, I’d be unstoppable. So how am I changing things around for myself? I started by taking time off to breathe and also weeding out everything that stressed me or even gave me anxiety. Then I was able to identify those things I spent most of my time every day on, some of which are reviewing TV shows, addressing social issues, advocating for equality and fashion of course. Bottom line of my story is, it’s okay to not have your shit together. Also, as young people, we need to let go of self-doubt and take the plunge! …………… Maryam is telling us to not beat ourselves up for not having certain things in place and we should never doubt ourselves. I think that works, because if you don’t believe in yourself who will. In addition to this, today is 6th November and what happens on this day? It’s my mum’s birthday! You know how we do it every year, I tell all my readers to help give her a call and let her know how amazing she is. She clocks 55 today and I can only pray that Allah makes me very successful soon so I can do many wonderful things from her. If you would like to call her, please send me a private message via Twitter(omotolaniee) or Instagram(omotolanieee) and I’ll give it to you. I appreciate ya all and I can’t forget the many calls she got last year from readers who participated. Thank you! I’ll be back. BOS.