S3E23: The present moment is not the end of the story

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Wednesday and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, the daily dose of language courage for people who love languages, and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway. 

And in today’s episode, I want to talk about the stories that we tell ourselves and the narrative threads we draw across our lives, and how they can either build us up, or hold us back.

So, as many of you know, my Tea with Me journey and the Language Confidence Project were born out of losing my home, my job, and two very important people in the pandemic in 2020. And one of the single biggest things that has made it harder to rebuild my life is the constant feeling that that was the end.

And I don’t mean that my life felt like it was over.

I mean the feeling that everything I’d done up until that point, every achievement, every life experience I had, was negated by the feeling of “and look where that got you”.

Every aspect of my life where I’d put effort became a cautionary tale. A tale of getting nowhere. A tale of actively backsliding. A tale of failing.

It was like nothing I’d ever done before meant anything.

And every day I replayed all the mean things, every criticism, every negative comment collecting all this perceived evidence that I was on track to fail and looking for signs everywhere that I was on the wrong path and it was inevitably all going to fall apart.

But none of that was true. None of that was fair or compassionate. And the further I get away from it now, coming out the other side, the more I can see that I had no reason to stop trusting myself.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? When something goes wrong, so many of us are so programmed to think that the most recent events are the end, and that the end has a moral lesson attached to it. That it’s the conclusion in which we get our comeuppance, we get what we deserve. But just because that’s how stories work doesn’t mean that’s how life works.

The present moment isn’t the end of the story.

It’s just the most recent chapter.  

So… if things aren’t going your way right now, in language learning, in other goals, or in life, don’t jump straight to beating yourself up for not working hard enough, doing enough or being enough. Don’t tell yourself you’re getting what was coming to you. Not everything that happens is a predictable consequence of your own actions. So let yourself drop that story.

Give yourself the opportunity to use this time as a springboard so you can look back, at some point not too far in the future and see it for what it is, which is unexpected obstacle or a plot twist. Allow the possibility that the moment where you thought you’d lost everythin gor that nothing is working is setting you on the track to be the person you want to be and putting you on the right path.

Be kind to yourself, language learners. You might not get instant results, and you might experience some real curveballs along the way, but you aren’t wasting your time. The present moment is not the end of the story. Every tiny thing you achieve today counts, and every word matters. I will see you tomorrow.