Imposter Syndrome: An Overview

 We are living in the 21st century where getting the next best thing on our resume is never out of our mental to-do lists. Everyday we wake up, go through our day, sleep and repeat. The brain is just so stuffed all the time. We overestimate the capacity of our brain to hold things in it. When sometime you were giving an exam, had it ever occurred that you just couldn't recall an answer at all, but as soon as you had submitted the answer-sheet the response just came flooding back as if it was always there staring at you, and laughing. It was because you were so stressed and the brain didn't like that so it focused on calming the body instead of recalling an answer. Similarly, when we are just so focused on giving our best, the brain cannot find energy to confirm whether or not to acknowledge if something you did was good enough.

      The war of doubt and confusion of if you deserve what you have in the first place with the feeling of you being an imposter even with all your accomplishments or attempts is quite common with the goal-oriented mindset of the current times. This psychological condition is termed as imposter syndrome or perceived fraudulence. There is no problem with occasional self-doubt since it leads to self-reflection but to chronically think as if wherever you are is just 'cause an angel dropped you cannot be a benefactor.

There can be many reasons behind this:

• Stress-It can make you feel as if you are doing work fast so you are not doing it well enough.

• Social Media-It stimulates the urge to be appreciated which if doesn't happen can fuel the feeling of not being good.

• Existential Crisis-When a major turn in life occurs i.e. a new phase in life begins we can feel different and undeserving.

• Reaching a High Position-Achieving many things can lead to the doubt that did you work enough or is it all fate and will be snatched soon.

• Peer Pressure-Nowadays having mental disturbances like OCD, clinical perfectionism, etc, have been highly romanticized and simplified in society. People are saying these things are easy to handle-although this can help in feeling normal but it often magnifies scenarios where there is no actual problem with one person but the person who actually has it can be left in shadows. It makes a perfectly fine person become self-doubting just as some people consider it to be 'Cool' or make a suffering person scared to confront their problems.

• Over-thinking-It can make you over-analyze your personality to the level where you  can't confirm if you are good at things you were a master at.

These are only a few reasons there are plenty more.

The main thing you can do to tackle it is understanding that almost everyone goes through this at least once in their life no matter what their age and that it's okay to feel as if you don't belong, time will calm the storm just as if it was never there. Other things which can help are:

1. Talking to someone about your self-questioning habits.
2. Going for Therapy/Counselling.
3. Journaling/Self-reflection.
4. Giving yourself a break.
5. Reminding yourself about the process behind all your achievements.
6. Trying to find the reason behind the problems and working on it rather than the issue.

"Everything becomes so precious when    your end is probably the next second."

                                                                                                               -Anne Frank 

 Note-No image in this blog is owned by me, all the rights go to their respective owners  and this is not written by a professional, just by a person writing from experience :)

Bullying

  Bullying is something which is around us all the time, but we don't acknowledge it. It has been given different terms for different phases in a person's life in school it's 'Bullying' in college/University it's Ragging, in later life it's what we call the social issues like racism, criticism, etc. But most of us can't bring to think that it's all the same thing at the end which we don't properly understand. Bullying is discriminating someone and making them feel bad about their personality, gender identity, sexuality, religion, caste, preferences, and just literally anything. Bullies make us feel bad about being our true selves.

They can make you too self-conscious and up to the level that you start hating who you are. When I was younger I was bullied for being an academic nerd. The problem was that the bullies didn't know what they were doing is bullying and I didn't know I was being bullied. People liked me because I was good at academics since any problem they had was solved by me immediately since I have always liked to help(people may consider this a foolish thing but it's my nature) but they hated that too, I don't know maybe because of they saw that as a skill they hadn't acquired. But I couldn't change that because I have always inclined towards books, even when I was a kid, I was not liking it on purpose. It was a tough deal but as I grew up, I gradually learnt to ignore it. Not all people are able to overcome this, because it's not easy to ignore people you can't help but see everyday.            

We need to normalize the fact that bullying can happen to anyone, anytime and that we should seek help when needed. It doesn't make you come of as a scared freak, it makes you brave that you are accepting the fact that something wrong is happening to you, and you are strong enough to take a step against it. Try to seek help, tell people, surely one will be willing to help you and others who don't won't care enough to tell others since they aren't interested in it anyways so it won't matter. Trust me that will be the best thing you will do for yourself. With the coming of social media this issue has increased but has also come into light. Cyber-bullying is bullying but rather using online means. Social Media was created to connect and bring light to issues hidden under the bed for the fear of hate, it was not made to spread hate, to rather stop it. Nothing is bad as long as the purpose it is used for is and we are the only one who can can make it happen. People don't try to stop this as perhaps they are scared to come of as a scared person or think maybe the bully is right, maybe people won't accept them. They don't want help because they are so used to receiving hate for being someone that they try to change things that can't  be changed. This is for you to know that everyone is bullied at least once for even the smallest things their favourite colour.

      

Stereotypes are created not because of the fact that someone is illiterate, they are created since someone wasn't able to understand that somethings can be beyond the scope of their understanding or liking and these stereotypes can make you the bully even when you don't know it so we need to stop making stereotypes. We need to stop things which are letting you become the person you hate and it all starts from accepting yourself and others and trying to understand that this planet currently has 7.9 billion people on it and we don't even know 25% of them so there will obviously be people who are different than whom you see and that shouldn't change the fact that all of us are unique but same. You need to preserve qualities of yourself which are unique, because they are the things which make you, you. You standing up for yourself will never be wrong for something like this. You need to gather the strength to be who you are, because diamonds are rocks too but they won't become special until they are put through so much of pressure and are courageous enough to survive it. You have this one life where if you change your personality or hide it because of the unbearable fear that someone else won't like it, is shameful because you are this amazing spectrum of these beautiful qualities knit into this piece of cloth which one day a Goddess will be gifted with and she will love it, and surely she wouldn't want to throw it away then why are you? See things from a different perspective and everything will be understandable. Helping for the right will never be wrong.

                               

Anti-Bullying Helpline(India)-155260(09:00 am-06:00 pm)

National(India)Cyber Crime reporting portal

Lastly if you see any sort of bullying around you help the person and if you can't at least tell someone who can.      

Note-No image in this blog is owned by me,all the rights go to their respective owners.

If I could have witnessed an event in History which one would I? Why?

History is such a beautiful collection of various perspectives of the some pages of the same book combined in a poetic rhythm, right? We can never realize as we get lost into the verse of time, imagining ourselves as a soldier in the war, or a princess who stood against the stereotype thoughts by becoming the best queen, or just a person who is enjoying the little things in his/her life as an architect in the Mesopotamian Civilization. The list is never-ending.

But although we can't be all these things we can think of ourselves as them just enough to romanticize the little things we never appreciate.

So not deteriorating from the main topic, if I were to witness an event in history I would visit the transition from the 90s to the 21st century. My choice has a lot of reasons. A major reason for it is transitioning culture and the change in the art of living.
If we start looking at this time period a lot of things have changed.
This was a period that had experienced a  sudden change to the digital world. Not only that this period had also gone through strangely beautiful switches in literature, arts, music, fashion, and technology.

For India too, this was a period of adapting to the liberation from a century and a half long colonization and getting accustomed to the modern ways of life. During this time there were movements regarding feminism, religious equality, protecting our Ecosystem, etc which were not that popular previously. I think this period is really important as now people had started standing up for themselves more than ever due to the growing popularity of the mindset that there should be freedom of speech for all.

The people who had been a part of this transitioning era had gone through major swaps in how they lived and their mindset.The nuanced technological advancements started to spread over the globe and people slowly started to get accustomed to things like mobile phones,etc.This was a grey era as neither did the people become surrounded by the walls of technology nor were the small walls being built were invisible.If I could be a person in that time I imagine myself being surrounded by beautiful people,amazing nuances,and just living a peaceful and serene life,a life which is not possible to live now that easily because of our dependence on technological advancements.

I think this would have been my favourite event/time period to visit in History as in my personal opinion there was a lot of simplicity in tasks then than there is now and it existed with people trying to get out of the stereotype mindset  so it is a plus point which cannot be majorly found in other time periods or events in history  for me.

Is Photo editing ethical?

 External characteristics, outer covers, delusions , facades...these words are related, no not because all of them can be used to segregate some adjectives but because all of them are used to hide the reality. As the famous saying goes Truth is always sour, the temptation for people to hide the reality keeps increasing. The biggest reason behind these lies is the question of the connection of confidence and self-worth with external beauty. The stereotype understanding that extreme happiness is related with the approval of yourself from others has led to this gruesome outcome.

  With the increase in the clutches of technology over people, we often want to hide our faces behind those we wished we had. But the petty excuse that we are only doing so that we look good for some time is pretty ironic with the situation of this era, where images have the power of controlling our emotions.

  The generation where editing was only used to provide a realistic cover to movies or to make some moments forever has dissipated. Now without cutting corners let us come to the title of this blog. What are your opinions on photo editing or rather even better do you think photo editing is important?

In my personal opinion photo editing is necessary in certain places like for brochures of companies to change background of pictures and to change certain aspects of images to make them tempting enough for the customer to buy it and at the bottom of most of them it is mentioned that the real product may not be the clone of the one in the image but we choose to ignore it and later blame the company .

It is quite gloomy to know that it isn't only used for the same purposes.With time the negative aspects of  this appreciable tool are shining brighter than its pros. This trend is also escalating with the use of social media and the thought process that all that glitters is gold. We need to understand that all that we see is not real and understand that it doesn't matter how much effort we have put into editing ourselves in an image the person behind the curtain will be same in a mirror. We need to understand that natural beauty is supreme and that it doesn't matter if we aren't as beautiful as a celebrity because to have that face they have spent plenty of money not to improve their skin, body, face, etc but to hide it and many of them do accept that.

Not to ignore that accepting the edited photo as the truth can lead to many consequences such as:

• Self-loathing
• Depression
• Suicide
• Cyber-crimes and dozens more!

Lastly I would like to say that everything is a coin with a heads and tails but everything shouldn't be flipped.

Note-No image in this blog is owned by me, all the rights go to their respective owners.

Some doable acts of Kindness during the pandemic

Saanvi, here☺.It took me an hour or so to anticipate what to write in this blog. I thought why not share some simple acts of kindness which can be done by you during Covid-19❤.

Donations-Donating masks, food, sanitizers-things which are the need of the hour.

Spreading awareness about staying in your home through social media platforms.

Writing gratitude letters to your postman/woman, local doctor, a neighbor who is perhaps a policeman-any one who is putting their life at stake to save yours.

Planting trees will help with the scarcity of oxygen nowadays.

Giving time to call your old grandparents, if they are staying alone in a different place so they don't feel lonely.

Contact a friend who you haven't talked to for long, because why not?

Wake up early someday to maybe cook something for your parents or cleaning the house just to surprise them.

Having a long talk with your sibling(s) about the problems they have maybe you have faced them already, so you can be a great advisor.

Make video lessons for students of younger classes, in your free time.

Call a peer or friend who is not joining the online classes due to some mis-happening in their house to help them with work.

And whatever else perhaps you can do, let's take a step to make a change...

No picture in this blog belongs to me-I have used almost all the pictures from google and they belong to their rightful owners.