I blinked and it’s already July, and we are well into summer. ‘Tis the season of berry picking, outdoor excursions, and bright skies at 9pm. My absolute favourite thing to do is to bring out pillows and blankets out on the porch at night, taking in the fresh summer night breeze, work on a blog post, read, and reflect on everything I’m grateful for in my journal. Sometimes I think we all just need some down time to relax and rewind from our busy lives, and bring ourselves back to this present moment. Think of everything you’ve done and achieved to have brought yourself to this very moment. Drop the past and future for a minute and reflect on what it means to be alive, right here, right now. Despite all your struggles, stresses, and difficulties you are facing in life, you are still here, still alive, and you can most definitely shift your mindset and challenge yourself to see any situation in a more vibrant light.

We are all human, and sometimes we like to shift our focus on things to complain about and show others how terrible we feel in hopes they will make ourselves feel better. But ultimately, we determine our own happiness and control our own feelings; others can help us feel better to the extent of their words and actions, but it is up to ourselves to shift our own mindset from being in a negative state to a positive one. We control our own outlook on every situation; nobody can change our mindset unless we allow our mindset to change to their perspective.

I feel as though this past year being in university, I’ve forgotten what it means to be balanced. I have grown so much as a person academically and have been presented a wealth of knowledge that I never knew existed. Despite taking the effort to care of myself, I’ve been deprived of sleep and deprived of simply doing things that make me happy. I had this mindset that if I do anything for myself with only the sole purpose of bringing myself happiness, my grades would suffer and therefore it wouldn’t benefit me or anyone. Now that it’s summer and I’ve finally had time to reflect and think about this year, where I stand, and where I want to move forward, I just want to express my gratitude with the friends I’ve made, the people I’ve had the pleasure to meet, my loving family and dog, having a lovely place I can call home away from home, the experiences and lessons I’ve encountered and learned from, and even all the really stupid mistakes I’ve made (like taking a Geography course hoping it will be a GPA booster, forgetting my umbrella when heading out the door and saying “whatever, I can deal” but end up getting soaked when walking home, being too shy to get to know more people, putting some other solution in a buret instead of NaOH and having to perform the titration experiment 6 times, and countless others). I can’t even express in words how grateful I am to have such a strong support system in my life. Even in the moments of feeling alone, I know that they will always relate to my situation and be cheering me on, and I can only hope I am able to reciprocate what they do for me.

Any outing with Jessica and Leung will always be a good time. Whether it be going for ice-cream on a Friday night in the midst of winter, ranting about our struggles with university, relating and sympathizing with each other, hearing Jess declare her love for Cob’s chocolate chip hot cross buns, waiting at the bus stop across from the “Hip Baby” storefront, and taking socially unacceptable and ridiculously hideous pictures with the self-timer, and watching “Love, actually” together with no idea of what was actually going on because we were too busy drinking Bailey’s hot chocolate and eating guacamole to care about the movie, these two just bring pure joy and positivity to my life. Like I mentioned before (and I can’t mention enough), so much gratitude. And so many more ice-cream runs, Christmas parties, and Friday night ventures next year and the years to come with these two.

There are also these two I will be forever grateful for. Despite them being on the East coast for university, we’ll always arrange time to Skype and update each other on our lives. I don’t think we can ever forget the crazy times growing up together in middle school, tackling the challenges of high school, and although we have chosen different paths for our university experience, our journey sharing every detail of each other’s lives and laughing at the weirdest jokes is still going strong, and will continue on until we become old and wrinkly.

I believe there are two types of people in life: some talk to you in their free time and some free their time to talk to you. There are many others who have impacted me and shaped me into who I am today, and this post would be a novel if I named them all. All I can do in return is to make them feel loved when they don’t have the strength to do it themselves.

Sometimes you have to experience the dark & ugly in order to appreciate the bright & beautiful. I’ve learned that nothing is as crazy as it seems, nothing is worth reducing your health, and nothing is worth poisoning yourself into stress, anxiety, and fear. And I think it is time for us to see the world in a more positive light, live in vibrancy, do things that bring us happiness, and raise each other up because in all honesty, it’s a good life.