Trying to improve my life as my broken leg heals

[ShadowEye]

Hello to anyone reading this, I am really trying to make some serious changes in my life and have been for a while now. I will start off by telling you a bit about myself. My name is Noah, I am 20 years old, 2 weeks from today I will be 21 and I feel like my life has been going no where for a long time. I am currently struggling to focus on writing this right now and I feel like I have never really been able to truly focus and maintain interest in things in my life. Every time I feel enthusiastic about things in life those feelings quickly fade away or are just replaced by being interested in something else. I have been working the same job now for 3 years and I don't necessarily hate it but I definitely would not say that I love it by any means. I work as an assembler for a company that builds industrial electrical enclosures for many other companies all over the world. One of my biggest fears is that I end up spending my whole life at this job which I am unhappy at because I decided to take the safer path in life. I realize that I could do the thing that I don't want to be doing for my life and then things with this job still wouldn't possibly work out and I would have been better off just doing the things I wanted to do. I have seriously been considering traveling but I am very afraid to quit my job, I got it while I was in high school and have been working very hard. My hard work has paid off in the way that I have my own apartment when most of my friends are still living with their parents. It has not paid off in the way that I feel like I am selling my life for a paycheck.

I have been debating what I would really love to do with my life for a long time now. I attended a technical high school which had many different programs for any career path you could want to go down. Before high school I always thought about being a police officer, as I got a bit older and started hanging out with the wrong people, getting into drugs, and many other things that I really should have been avoiding changed that. When I was a little kid I always had straight A's and was in the gifted program, was really into watching anime and playing Yugioh with my friends. I think as I got a bit older I was tired of being picked on for being a "nerd" and that is why I stopped doing things that I really enjoyed, instead turning to other things to try to have fun and be cool id say around the age of 13. Because I did not want to go into law enforcement anymore I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do and was very unsure which program I would choose once I was in high school. Before your freshman year at this school starts you have to pick a "cluster" of programs to tour through and because I lose interest so easily I was afraid to choose something that I would just end up losing interest in even if I really did enjoy it. I chose the technology cluster because I wanted a career in which I could make the most money and that was what I thought would be best. I toured through the programs and ended up deciding on the electronics technology program.

The teacher of this class is honestly still one of my biggest inspirations in life today. He was the type of teacher that truly cared about his students and wanted every single person to be successful, no matter who you were. He had left a much higher paying job so that he could teach and also be able to spend more time with his kids. Because this class was 3 times longer than a normal class he could spend this whole entire time talking about many different things not just teaching. I learned many valuable lessons from him and will always appreciate everything he has done for me. I chose an electronics class and as you can imagine there were a lot of "nerds" there but I always felt different. I feel like to everyone else in school that I am a nerd but to the guys in that class I guess you could say that I was the "cool" one. Mostly because none of them had anything to do with drugs or girls. In this class I definitely screwed around a lot, especially in the beginning. Because my teacher was so strict I definitely learned to behave more, or at least hide the things I was doing better. The teacher never gave up on me even though I would fall asleep often through boring lessons. He constantly pushed me and encouraged me and he saw something within me that no one else had seen since I was in elementary school as one of the smartest kids in my class. I was the only person in my class to leave classes my senior year and go to work my job that the school had found for me which is where I currently still am. I think one of the main reasons that leaving this job to pursue the things I truly want in life scares me so much is because my teacher was so proud of me knowing that I was working hard every single day, and he was seeing the changes that he had made within me, I was no longer the kid who slept in class his freshman year.

What I would really love to do is apply the amount of work ethic I have at my job to my whole entire life. I have been doing all kinds of research and listening to podcasts and watching videos for years now about all sorts of different things you can do to better your life but only ever taking small inconsistent actions which never really end up doing anything for me. I would say about 3 months ago was when I really started to try and make many more positive changes in my life but there were still  so many parts of me that were just absolutely lazy. I eventually decided I would go to the library and look for books either on improving my life or traveling which is something I have always wanted to do but just thought of it as a fantasy that would never be financially possible. I guess it wasn't long before I check out "Level up your life" at the library that I was researching traveling to countries in southeast Asia and how cheap it really can be. I started reading the book and it felt like the first thing I could really connect myself with. There were so many parts of this book that I felt I could truly relate to and could really help me. I started to make a lot more changes in my life and started planning for the other changes I want to make in the future before and after I start to travel. I have always been in pretty good shape but I am still very lazy. One of the things that I was trying to do was exercise more outside of work and have more energy to do more of the things that I wanted to do in life. Because I was able to drive I did not ride my skateboard or longboard as much as I did when I was a teenager before my license. Despite not riding it often I still did do it occasionally and it was and is still one of my favorite activities. I downloaded a lot of apps including meditation instructions and an app to track my physical activities.

According to the app I was riding about 5 miles around my neighborhood on my longboard when I went out. I started to ride once or twice a week and was still trying to push myself to go out and ride more. Putting in my headphones and listening to my favorite music as I cruise and sometimes fly down the streets has always been one of my favorite things to do. One of the things I was trying to also push myself to do was getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. I was for the most part riding on similar routes and I wanted to do start to ride my board in places that  I was unfamiliar with. The first day I decided to go ride on some new roads one of my  worst nightmares came true. I was doing some of my laundry over at my mom's house and I decided to go ride my longboard before I switched my clothes into the dryer. I rode a few miles away and had a pretty good idea of the steep hill I wanted to ride down but never had before. When I made it to this hill I wasn't nervous at all. I didn't sit at the top of the hill and think about it, I turned from one road onto another road and just planned on going down this hill, going fast, and having fun. I would say I was going about 30 mph when my board started to wobble. Almost instantly it gave out from under me and I flew forward, the first thing to hit the ground was my right foot before I slide another 5 to 10 feet after falling forward on my body. I tried to stand up but could not put any weight on my right leg at all. I crawled over into someone's yard and they were sitting outside, they saw what happened and helped me out. I got a ride back to my moms house from them where no one was home and called my mom after I crawled across the floor onto the couch and told her I was pretty sure I broke my leg. She was out of the area and my stepdad wasn't answering his phone but he soon came home and drove me to the hospital. I told my mom I was pretty sure I broke my leg but to be honest I still wasn't positive at all. I had broken 2 bones previously and the pain this time was unlike either of those. There is a lot more details about my whole hospital trip but to make a long story short I was told I had to get surgery for my leg because I had fractured it pretty badly. What happened was my foot hit the ground with enough pressure to fracture the part of my leg bone right under my knee as it pushed up into my knee. My surgery happened on October 17th and the doctors kept telling me it was bad and eventually I asked how bad. He told me that the part I had broken was in about 3 big pieces and 40 small ones.

December 17th is the two month date after my surgery and also happens to  be my 21st birthday. Hopefully by then things will be returning back to normal but since then I have been pretty much just been laying around depressed. I know there are so many things I could have been doing this whole time, trust me I think about it every single day. I was making a lot of progress before my injury, breaking my leg and having to get this surgery just made me feel so depressed. I cringe at the thought of riding down that hill every single time it pops into my head. I am really afraid that once I am healed that I will be exactly how I was before, lazy with no motivation to make the changes and do the things I need to do so that I can be happy and successful. I guess the main reason I am writing this is to reach out. I would like to make some better friends in my life. I know that the only real way I am going to get things done in my life is if I can build up the motivation myself and there is nothing that anyone or anything is going to be able to do for me. I just feel like I haven't had too many positive influences in my life. I feel like I really need to start having better friends in my life. I am also wondering if there is something I am missing, if anyone has any ideas or suggestions or just has anything to say to me at all I would greatly appreciate it. Honestly typing this is a pretty big step in itself for me because before today I was just being absolutely lazy and letting life pass me by. Last night I cried a lot thinking about how I think about all these changes I want and need to make in my life and I don't know why I feel like I cant do it and I am not good enough for anything. A part of me feels dumb for saying all the things I am because I normally never ask for help and I know that many people believe that there is nothing they could say or do to help me because I can't even help myself but I honestly feel like this is all I can do. I really feel lost and I hope someone has some type of advice or something to say to me at all, it would really mean a lot. Thank you to anyone who reads this and decides to respond, I am really hoping to get my life on track here soon, start to do everything in life I want to do, and truly become a happier person.

[TGP]

the desire to improve you live is great; but the real magic comes, I think, from deciding what that means and doing it.

 

so what do you think?  you've told us what your life is like and that you clearly want thing to be better.  what would that mean? 

 

I wish you luck Noah.  Welcome to NF.  I'm pretty new around here as well; but there is quite a few people in the "challenges" making goals; and day by day trying to achieve them.

[juliebarkley]

Welcome to the Rebellion!

 

I’m so sorry to hear that you hurt yourself doing something that you love. When you are already feeling down, that’s a real kick in the pants. It’s understandable that you feel that nothing is going right. But there is always something that you can do, and coming here is a great start.

 

It is really hard to change your personal habits. It doesn’t make you a failure that you are struggling. Try just changing a little thing at a time. Having a small success will show you that you can do this. We are all rooting for you!

 

It sounds like you are doing a lot of thinking about what you truly want from life. It is so easy to do the things that others expect of us (or just whatever is usual) without thinking about whether that is actually what we want. You seem to really respect your old teacher; have you considered getting in touch with them to talk about career stuff? 

[ShadowEye]

Well I am thinking about traveling and have been seriously considering making a documentary as I travel. If not that I would spend that time really thinking and trying to decide what I would like to do.