Life Post │My Life in 2016: Dreams, Accomplishments, and Loses

Here comes this day, where we assess our life, our thoughts, and our performance at the end of each year. In every organization, managers evaluate performance of their employees. In every school, teachers test students’ academic skills. And in every year, we assess ourselves. We ask same questions every time:
Did I achieve my goals?
Did I make a difference this year?
At the beginning of every year, we strive toward two goals: make difference in our lives, and strengthen our bonds with beloved ones. One of the things we tend to assess is our social life: who entered our life, who supported us, and who left us behind. Those who made difference in our lives are the ones we strive to keep.
Another aspect we assess is our memories: both happy and sad ones. We promise ourselves to maximize happy memories and minimize sad memories every year.
Today I shall make one difference in my life: share personal story of my life.
In 2014 & 2015 I lost two of my closest family members: my grandma and my uncle. These loses impacted me negatively and my days were filled with sorrow and grief. In short, my life had lost its color. When I wrote 2016: New Year, New Memories blog post I was completed devastated with how 2015 turned out. It was truly the worst.
So on 1^st January 2016, I made a wish and prayed for it: No more sorrow, no more grieve, and no more loses. I got tired of these feelings. Luckily, the Lord listened to my prayers and my wish came true at a time where I didn’t expect to see light.
In 2016, I’ve accomplished three major goals:

• Graduated from university: the dream finally came true; I graduated from Sultan Qaboos University with a Bachelor Degree in Finance. I can’t believe it; I made it after 5 years of struggling with stress and studies. I missed many fun opportunities, events, hangouts, and moments for joy. I sacrificed them all to accomplish this dream. Now, I finally made it and I’m glad that I made this sacrifice. Check out my post as I expressed my gratitude for witnessing this day: Life Post │My Graduation

• Get hired at well-known organization: sooner than I thought, I got hired in audit department in KPMG. KPMG is a company that provides audit, tax and advisory services to many organizations in both public and private sector. Personally, I have never thought of starting my career journey in audit, but after working for 5 months I realized that this is what I truly want. Achieving such goal at a time where market is going through recession is a great life-time opportunity. I’m proud of this accomplishment and I hope that I can develop myself throughout my career life.

• Meet my soul mate: now this is an unexpected goal, getting engaged. Before getting engaged, I had set criteria for the guy I would want to commit a long-relationship with. Because my criteria were hard to find, I did not expect to get engaged within this year or any time soon. Surprisingly I did find the guy that fit all criteria and had more characteristics that I was pleased with. Getting engaged was a very big step I took this year, as this will be a change in lifetime. I’m happy for taking this decision and I’m grateful for achieving this goal.

All these wishes are very dear to me. They boosted my confidence and self-esteem. After being pessimist for two years, I can now smile and not worry about my future. I’m no longer suffering from anxiety, depression or even stress. I couldn’t be thankful enough to the Great Lord for pulling me out of darkness and bringing me into light.
As happy as I sound, there were days that I wish they never existed. As time passed, I came across difficult moments and situations that I have not anticipated to come. Let me briefly state circumstances that I went through:

• Hospitalized for 6 days: In my post Life Post │Why did I disappear? I mentioned that I got food poisoning in January and I stayed 6 days in the hospital. Physically, this was a very tough experience as I was very weak. I could not eat or drink anything for 4 days, and after 7 days I managed to eat very little. It took me almost a month to fully recover from food poisoning and until now I’m very cautious about what I eat.

• Lost my car: another tough experience I had to go through is lose of my car in an accident. I had this car since 2012 and I had great memories with it. Unfortunately, it was strongly hit in an accident and got completely scrapped. I’m truly grateful for being alive and not getting injured, as my parents said: “You can always replace a metal with another”.

• Loss of close ones: every year, you get to meet new people and lose contact with some, but what about those who were very close and dear to you? For some reasons, I no longer contact those who were very dear to me. Promises were broken, my feelings were hurt, and the relationship became toxic. As much as I wanted to stay in touch with them and forgive them for their mistakes, I couldn’t take it anymore, it was too much burden and I felt that my heart does don’t deserve to bear this pain. Nevertheless, I wish them all the best in their lives.

As you can see, my life had blessings and challenges. It was a tough but lovely year to live and I’m grateful for everything that has happened throughout my life. Before I finish up with this post, I would like to state lessons that I have learned this year:

• The success of every relationship is dependent on both parties. Each party needs to be comprising, passionate, and determinant to keep the boat sailing on the sea. Ignorance is the key to destruction of every relationship. If one party neglected the other, the other party will eventually leave them behind after a while.

• Confidence and determination are essential keys to achieve any goal in your life. If you believe in yourself and you are determined to go through whatever it takes to achieve a goal, then you can achieve anything.

• Never keep your dreams limited to your capabilities, always dream big. If you want a dream to come true, turn it into a goal and work for it. Do not wait for others to make your dreams come true, you should work for it on your own.

• Learn from difficult experiences, as they always carry a valuable lesson for you to learn. Do not focus on negative side of such incidents, instead look at positive aspects to it. You never know, how positively this could impact you. If you went through a tough situation and you don’t know how to overcome it then check out this post Life Post │Tragedies: How to overcome them.

Well this is it, my last post in 2016. I hope you all enjoyed reading this post and I wish 2017 would be a very happy new year to you all. See you all in the next post.