Be Responsible Towards Yourself - Not Others

Being responsible is something that is thought to be imperative to a successful human life - to be a respectable and liked person you have to be responsible for your family, for your boss and coworkers, for your country. Sure, it's good to be a trustworthy person who keeps their promises, but

being too dutiful to others can sometimes make us neglect the most important responsibility we have - our responsibility towards ourself.

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Especially living in Korea, probably one of the most hard-working countries in the world (statistics provided by a very credible source aka myself) I too often see people sacrificing themselves in order to be responsible students or workers or children to their parents. Studying in one of the top universities here, I've probably never seen people as conscientious as I do in our school - everyone is always studying, trying to get the best grades, or trying to get a government license for a profession in order to get a good job (or go to a good university), which seems to be the top priority of people. All their lives, people are studying, studying and studying, always abiding by the guidelines, doing whatever they can in order to get ahead in the system. It is the most stressful lifestyle I have ever seen in my life.

And what's worse is that living here I, for a moment, fell in the same trap. I spent almost two years in complete misery and distress, all because I started to question my own sanity, as the always so carefree and optimistic me started to look at the people around me and starting to adopt their stressful ways of thinking and behaving. I had always acted out of my motivation and done what I thought was the best for me and for the people around me, as that was something I learned to do since I was very young. And that had never failed me. However, for whatever reason it was at the time (I cannot really remember what my thought process was like at the time), I decided to try to become a "responsible" person.

I traded my responsibility towards myself to a responsibility towards others.

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And what misery followed. I spent around a year and a half living the most stressful life, as I tried to be a good student and abide by all the the guidelines without missing any classes (attending classes is mandatory in Korea, however most professors don't seem to care for actual participation) and getting good grades (and getting good grades here in Korea means memorization instead of actual understanding of the information). I became a complete slave, as I slowly forgot my sense of self and my enthusiasm and true interest for things. And what is even funnier, is that in my intense stressed-out focus for achieving things, I received worse grades than I ever had, and my whole life started to fall apart.

It seems that trying to control everything usually only creates destruction.

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After many trials and fails I have finally regained my trust in myself. That means me putting my needs as the priority no matter the situation. There are many ways that this can manifest as but today it manifested as me skipping my classes because my sick ass needed rest. Depending where you are from that might seem like an obvious thing to do, but if I was focused on getting good grades instead of living a good life, I would've had to go to class (as I mentioned, participation is mandatory here, and missing even one class will usually lead to point reduction. Classes being relatively graded instead of absolutely graded, this means that even missing one class can actually lower your grade). And my responsibility towards myself doesn't end here: it is present in every decision that I make, whether it be me canceling an appointment with a person when I don't feel like meeting them is good for me, or the career choice I make. And even though it might sound selfish at first, I think ultimately listening to yourself is the wisest thing you can do.

Because happy people make others happy.