Patience has never been my strong suit
Growing up, I have always been aware how short-tempered and impatient I am. It has not always been something that bothered me before. I thought it was normal to be like that as most of the people around me are like that.
As I get more experiences, I realize that not everyone has a short temper nor patience. Some even seems like they can never run out of patience for people who kept repeating their mistakes.
Unlike me who has grown up with the default of talking loudly to get my point across when I am impatient. When I realized this, I tried to go to the other extreme which is shutting down when I am impatient.
How many times have you been so irritated that you just could not even be bothered to talk?
For me, it happened far too many time the past few years that I cannot remember the number of times. In one instance, I was so irritated with people not doing their parts in our group project, that I did their parts and did not bother to acknowledge their excuses or alibis.
But there is another side to this, like I said when I am frustrated and my short patience run out, I tend to let my mouth ran. I even end up hurting people I love with my words. I have always been good at aiming where it hurts so I know just how much I am hurting them but when I had enough, I just could not stop talking.
I remember one time when Manju and I had a fight, I tried to ignore her but when she did not stop, I retaliated with hurtful words which ended up making her cry. I felt incredibly guilty afterwards, and the only sorry I could give was giving food as a peace offering.
There was also a time when I was so done with my groupmates not being able to follow simple instructions that I ended up being so arrogant and hurtful. I sent a message to our group chat about how I could have done all their parts in a day and I do not understand how tbey wete unable to do it propeely after being given 5 days to work on it. I only realized how stupid I was being back then when the presentation got canceled. I apologized about it and they apologized too. This situation helped me become a better leader when there is a group activity.
Since the pandemic started, I found a lot of time to reflect on myself deeply. I finally confronted parts of myself that I hated but ended up ignoring them before. However due to my free time, I decided that it is worth the effort to face who I truly am and work on becoming who I wanted to be.
The past 2 years, I worked on many parts of myself (physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually). I explored many things that I wanted to do as well. This year, I decided to finally work on my patience. I made a bit of progress last year but it was not my priority so I did not make a lot of conscious decisions.
I could hold my tongue off for a few minutes but I still end up hurting my sisters with my words. When I am impatient with my partner, I do the opposite which made me shut down and not say anything until I could gather my thoughts.
So this year, I planned to work on lengthening my patience with the help of the paint by numbers kit gifted to me by Manju.
I already shared some of my thoughts about it in a previous article. I started painting it on the first day of the year and finished painting all the number 1s on the canvas. I wanted to do the painting one number at a time but since I decided to give myself a year to finish the painting, I had to fight my impatience on getting it done.
Today, I started painting the number 2s.
It is not looking like much of a good painting right now which made me want to do it all at once but I keep fighting the urge to do that. There is also a part of me that is developing patience because of the slow progress.
I had never been fond of making paintings that took up a long time since I am impatient so this is a new experience for me. But I still persevere since I know that I will be better at handling different circumstances once I manage my patience.
I also learned to focus on taking care of my words when I feel frustrated, I am taking the time to breathe and to think things through before saying or doing anything. So I guess this little experiment is helping me out day by day.
Closing words
I almost forgot to publish an article today but good thing I remembered when I woke up from my nap.
I wrote this because my patience is being tested on waiting for our grades. I have already seen my grades on 3 subjects and all of them are 1.75 haha. The highest grade we could get is 1.00 so I think that is a good enough grade.
Thank you for reading this article!
If you want to read some more articles of mine, I have monthly summaries here:
December 2021 Articles Summary
November 2021 Articles Summary
September 2021 Articles Summary
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It is really nice if we do things that could better ourselves. 😊 when my patience is tested, I try to breathe, close my eyes and say a short prayer. But when I am really, really, really so dmnd pssd, I explode and then I would ask for forgiveness though not to the person but to God when things have cooled down. I still have to lesrn how to say sorry to the person if I will lose my cool next time.