Dealing with self doubt

Let me start by apologizing for my absence here with the newsletter. I don’t have a good reason other than the general feeling of blah-ness that I’ve been experiencing lately. However, I received so many emails and DMs asking about the newsletter, so it’s good to know that a lot of you enjoy and look forward to it, and I’m determined to keep up with it and send these out more often. :)

I want to share with you a couple of milestones that I hit recently. My YouTube channel now has over 300,000 subscribers, a number that I never even aimed to reach back when I started YouTubing. I also hit 100,000 followers on Instagram. Both of these milestones are pretty big if you think about it.

On the face of it, you’d think I’d be ecstatic about hitting these milestones. I thought so too, and although I’m glad to be where I am, a part of me felt pretty ‘blah’ about this (for the lack of a better word). I’ve been doing a lot of introspection on why I felt this way and came to an interesting realization.

It turns out, a big part of why I wasn’t feeling so good about this is because I felt like I should have hit these milestones sooner. There seemed to be so many people growing faster than I am, and I had subconsciously started comparing my progress to others’ even though our circumstances were completely different (for example, I couldn’t even post travel content much over the last year, which obviously affected the growth of my channel and was something beyond my control). I had subconsciously fallen into the trap of comparing myself to others, and the problem with this is, no matter how good you’re doing yourself, there will always be people who are doing better than you are. Of course, there’ll always be people who aren’t doing as well as you are too, but when you’re in comparison mode, your brain conveniently ignores to give you a balanced perspective. If you let these thoughts go unchecked, you’re doomed to feel like you’re not good enough regardless of what you accomplish.

As they say, comparison is the thief of joy. I’m someone who’s tried to avoid comparing herself to others, yet subconsciously, it somehow crept up without me even realizing it. Nonetheless, I’m glad I took the time to introspect what was happening and consciously tried to shift my thoughts to be more aligned with what I believe, and I genuinely feel so good about myself and everything that I've managed to accomplish so far. :)

I honestly wasn’t planning on sharing this with so many of you because it makes me feel quite vulnerable to admit that hitting these major milestones made me feel not-so-good.  But as I was sitting down to write this newsletter, I just felt compelled to share this because I know so many of us constantly fall into this trap of comparing our lives to others, whether personally or professionally.

So I hope this email serves as your sign to stop comparing and feel grateful for who you are and everything that you have right now.