How one single choice changed my life

One year ago I was living in a big city working hard and believing that I was realizing my dreams, but only now I know that I was completely wrong!

Living in Brussels made me feel surrounded by opportunities and when you are young and you want to build a career that’s great, right?

Well, I believed so, but regardless of the thousand things I was doing, something was making me feel stuck in chaos and anxiety and, even worse, I felt that I was wasting my life. This was until I realized what was causing me all that and decided that it was time to change everything.

All you need is a blank canvas

In order to paint something new, you need to start from a blank canvas, you cannot start drawing on top of another chaotic draw. So basically this article is about how I created that blank canvas.

The first advantage of having this black canvas is to be able to start really thinking about things because we cannot think while we’re living and we cannot live while thinking. So once you find some peace in your life, you can finally answer questions like: what am I working for, what makes me happy and how can I achieve it?

Why things happen

Do you ever feel like you are struggling so much to stay on the right path, but somehow there is always something deviating you from that? That’s exactly how I felt.

I waked up every day thinking “today I’ll do this, this and this”, but at the end of the day, I didn’t do half of the things I planned, just because, in the while, something else happened and distracted me. Until I suddenly realized that those things didn’t just happen, I was making them happened because I was not able to control the chaos around me and continuously allowing things to ruin my plans day by day.

Now I need to be a bit brutal and this wasn’t easy to accept, but please think about the things you planned for today, and think what didn’t allow you to complete all the tasks. Was that completely inevitable, or you just let those random things steal time to your day?

Really, try to be honest with yourself because except certain actual inevitable things, which fortunately don’t happen every day, all the others happens just because we allow them to happened, and they are actually a great chance to find an excuse for our failure.

Please don’t fell guilty, we all go through this and it’s completely normal, but it’s very important to be aware of that if you want to clear things out.

What to do

Leaving the chaos is the first thing to do because it means to clear things out, to take everything we have in our life and choose what to keep and what to abandon. Choosing what’s important and what’s not, may seems difficult but it’s actually quite easy because we, somehow, already know all the answers, we just have to be brave enough to face it, and find some time to figure it out.

What I did was literally writing down everything: all the things I was working on, the things I loved and the things I hated. Then I asked myself for each of these things: why am I doing it? What’s the point, what’s the goal?

And I was shocked! I was doing too many things that didn't matter but only made me messy, stressed and frustrated because what chaos does is also stealing so much energy from us, energy that we should have used instead for the thing that is most important to us.

So, I decided to keep and dedicate myself to only two things: one that was crucial for my career and one for my mental wellness.

My radical decision

I have completely freed myself from all those excuses and made a radical decision: I changed house, area and country to go living in the middle of nowhere. Indeed, the main source of meaningless tasks for me was the city life: too many things to care about and too many obstacles to the dream of being a musician, finally record music and share it with the world.

So, I moved into a much bigger house in Italy, in a very small village surrounded by nature and silence, and this is where I am now enjoying my new life.

When I realized all that, I was sure that once I moved to the new house I would finally be happy and I would start enjoying my life and, when I did it, well, it didn’t happened. The first couple of months were quite difficult because I had to reorganize everything, but when I was finally set up I slowly started to realize that I was really in a good path and that my decision was not wrong.

Important suggestions

This is one of the things I discovered in my journey: don’t put too much pressure on being happy and enjoy life at all costs. If you just discovered something new about yourself, that’s great, but changes always causes a lot of stress. So, give yourself some time to recover before judge if your decision was right or not.

Quitting from chaos the way I did, means that you will be more alone and you will probably feel some loneliness, and dealing with loneliness is not always easy but, especially if you’re a creative person, you will understand how loneliness is a key to be more focused in what you do, and this means be more successful.

Creativity, sensitivity and chaos

Loneliness will make you more creative and focused on what matters. This was fundamental for me because I’m an artist, but creativity is helpful to anybody because when you’re more creative you suddenly realize that there are lot of ways to live your life, and you can also find solutions a lot more easily. Before moving, I thought that creativity came from the outside, from take everything that is around you, all the situations, all the people and let them inspire you, but now creativity means find something inside me or around me but in a little details like the colors of the sky, the seasons, the flowers and so on.

The great thing about all this is that you’ll be a lot more sensible because you no longer have to protect yourself from the outside. It can seems magical but colors will start to be more vivid, food will taste better and you will finally start to enjoy life instead of endure it.

Here where I live, I discovered the absolute beauty of silence and I was very surprised to figure out that chaos is not just something in our mind but it’s also something physical because living in a silent place automatically made me more relaxed and focused. We think that we’re used to noises, but even if we don’t hear it anymore, it’s there and it causes us a lot of sadness and anxiety.

One of the best suggestions

This is one of the best suggestion I can give you:

Research for silence as much as you can

For me, silence is even more important, since practicing music in silence means reaching a deeper level of concentration in music on smallest details, which is impossible otherwise. This improved the quality of my work so much that I felt that in this year I made progress like never before.

Conclusion

Since I made this change, I start living a more focused life, I was able to take record and publish more than 10 pieces on YouTube, and even release music on Spotify, and this is for me just the beginning of this journey. Being able to do what I love the most made me very very happy.

It doesn’t matter how many things you do, even if you think that they are helpful to reach your dream, you need to find the one and only thing that makes you enjoy your time with yourself.

So, my way was quitting of this chaos of thousand of things, quitting a lifestyle that I didn’t like, moving to a completely new place without certainties, and trying to do that one thing that I wanted to do and finally start to enjoy my life.

Roberta