My Learning Curve Is Huge? Hmm… That’s Interesting.

   Whenever I shared my life progress with her, a mentor, keenly interested in my growth, would often respond, ‘Your learning curve is huge.’ As a highly sensitive individual, I would often analyse and reanalyse the meaning of those words. What I have found over the years is that even now, my views on what they mean keep changing, depending on what’s happened in my life and how I’ve responded to those events. For instance, if I feel down in the dumps when something, for want of a better word, bad happens, I would perceive ‘your learning curve is huge’ as extremely patronising and condescending, the way a cocky adult might say, ‘Grow up and buck up, kiddo,’ or ‘You’re still young and inexperienced. You know nothing,’ to a child or a younger adult. Occasionally, I would even regard the sentencing sentence (yes, me and my daft pun again) as a backhanded compliment, something along the lines of, 'Ooh! You've learnt an unbelievable lot for your age, haven't you?' When something that brings me hope occurs however, my interpretation of those words changes, completely! Their meaning becomes, ‘I am so proud of you. You have learnt so much, your potential is enormous and you have a luminous future ahead,’ – or in other words, they become a golden affirmation uttered by someone who believes in me, genuinely and unconditionally. Reflecting on my perspectives on those words now, I’ve realised how free I am to respond – that I have all the freedom in the world, in fact, to respond to them however I like. What response(s) have I chosen today, then? I believe an affirmative and empowering one, to me at least.

  To contextualise, lately, I have felt a shift in my mind with regard to how I view learning. I no longer see that act and process as a chore. Neither have I forced myself, pretending to tell myself in my head in that bright and cheery singsong voice, ‘Learning is fun,’ when it would be inauthentic to do so at times. Having discovered how freeing and growth-fostering it is to accept all my emotions, positive and negative alike, learning is now more like a research into who I am and can be, like pursuing a PhD in self-discovery for free. It is hence a privilege, above anything else. Sometimes learning is hard. It is not always enjoyable. But whatever. It deepens my relationship with me, which is all that matters as regards Self-Ashtualisation, at the end of the day. Indeed, learning is sometimes not fun but I have learnt to love it unconditionally, through good and tough times. Thanks to that therapeutic and frequently tear-inducing spiral-shaped process called learning, I have discovered the following:

·       How to create navigation links on my blog.

·       How to insert photos and videos into my blog posts.

·       How to instal a cookie that will prevent my own views from being counted in my blogger stats by pasting a JavaScript snippet into my browser developer console – since the cookie set by Blogger doesn’t work.

·       How to ask Google to index my website and pages within the website, so that they are searchable online.

·       How to get Google Analytics to properly analyse my site performances.

And many, many more tech stuff I have never imagined I can do as an English graduate who could not be further from a software geek! So yes, my learning curve is huge and I embrace it 🤗