There comes a point in life where you’re faced with the clinical, cold reality that you don’t actually have your shit together as much as you think you do – if at all.

My realisation came in the form of a series of annoyed text messages from friends, flustered phone conversations with people (when I bothered to pick up my phone… or pay the bill) and constant encounters with my own sense of nonchalance about a few poor actions and choices.

Constantly finding myself in a position where I was either losing out on or affecting my chances of making money, being fired from my first internship at my dream placement, turning up to my job consistently late with nothing but a pitiful and a ‘sorry,’ to offer, making and then withdrawing at the last minute from social plans and continually dismissing my never-ending pile of paperwork which eventually threatened to get up and choke me in my sleep was all becoming too much.

It was during one particular ‘tiff,’ with a very close friend of mine who I’d let down through substandard communication, everything suddenly made perfect sense to me. It’s as if someone removed the blinder from eyes. I basically “got out of my own way,” (that saying is cheesy but it is the gospel!) All this time I was turning into the kind of person I really resented or at least disliked. I was becoming incessantly unreliable, inconsistent, my word was not my bond and I was in a perpetual state of deal-with-it-all-tomorrow-but-for-now-I’ll-sleep.

I’d finally grown tired of my own sh*t. There’s no way I could continue to bemoan certain personal situations – although a lot of it completely out of my control – to do just that, to trickle down into other areas of my life and take control of them. So I decided to take myself out of the social loop for a bit and just be totally by myself – which hasn’t been hard to be honest this summer has been very much one of taking on ‘adult’ endeavours for most of my friends and myself. Taking that time out to think about where I was going wrong and where I needed to pull myself together has helped me to refocus my energy, strategise and replenish my mind and my motivations. I’m still in the process so nothing is set in stone or completely figured out but already I’m taking things that need to be done a lot more seriously, approaching trials in my life with full force and getting back into the ring swinging.

I implore you to make the decision to refocus and think seriously about what it is that’s stopping you from being more or as efficient as you can or hope to be in your life – think of it as rebooting your soul’s CPU.