Seventeen

Well, well. So I'm finally seventeen. Not really sure what being a year older really means since maturity doesn't happen overnight - it's not as if I'd become this wise old (young) adult the moment the clock struck midnight on 21 February & that I'd get surrounded by tiny sparkles and fairy dust, magically transforming my mental capacity from a sixteen year old to that of a seventeen year old. No, of course it doesn't work that way at all, and I suppose my becoming a person of this age was a gradual process and who I currently am today was a result of that process. 

Taking a look back on the past seventeen years, I must say that I've been extremely fortunate. I've been blessed with so many things that I honestly don't think I really deserve. But above all, the most important lesson/ way of life I've learnt so far is the mindset I have towards my own life. Truth be told, the "life" that I portray on my various avenues of social media (especially Instagram) isn't really how my life is. On these places, somehow everything seems so perfect and I look happy most of the time. In fact, close friends enjoy telling me how Instagram Li Yin (and actually even blogger Li Yin) is very different from real life Li Yin. The way I behave when I'm with my friends I'm comfortable knows no boundaries - I just get really crazy and appear incapable of any deep thoughts or appreciative feelings, unlike the way I blog or my captions on Instagram. However, I know this is quite scary but even the weird/ crazy girl I am when I hang out with people isn't an accurate reflection of who I really am nor my life. 

Be it portraying a happy version of myself, be it portraying a reflective version of myself or be it portraying a crazy version of myself, notice that all these are images of me glowing with positivity. And I'm not saying that these are images I've formed purposefully and that I'm secretly this really emo and sad person behind the masks I wear because that's just quite eerie. That is not what I'm getting at at all and it'd be such a horrible bombshell to drop on the people who know me after seventeen years of my existence. 

But really, what I'm trying to say is that real life Li Yin, Instagram Li Yin, blogger Li Yin and whatever other platforms I have formed an image of myself on are all me. To be exact, these platforms portray the eventual person I truly want to become. I'm not trying to be fake, though some people may just label me as that but I constantly take particular care to censor truly negative parts of my life from public domains and honestly, even the closest of my friends. I do rant to people, just like a normal human being does but those are really just tiny things - I have this little personal policy of mine to not draw attention to the flaws in my life (which are actually many) because for one, the more you think about the negative things, the worst it'll be and get to you and secondly (and not so importantly), possibly because I've been raised in a (semi) traditional Chinese family and Chinese people enjoy "face" and it's a tad embarrassing to talk about the shitty things in one's life. 

This is such an incoherent post but the bottomline is that - after seventeen years, I have learnt that the positive mindset I have towards my own life (i.e. the way I portray my life everywhere, even in person) is one of the things pride myself the most for. At the start, it may just have been something I did only because I wanted people to think that my life was great (shallow Li Yin surfaces), but eventually, it started morphing into the parts of my life that I valued the most and somehow, all these positive vibes I've been portraying of myself slowly overshadowed the negative bits in my life. And that's great - I truly appreciate the mindset that I somehow grew to have & at this point in time, I do believe that the past seventeen years of my life have been incredibly fulfilling - and yes, I'm saying this because I mean it. 

Oh, and by the looks of my Instagram feed (hurhurhur), I guess I had a very happy birthday :-) And I really did. Thank you to everyone who made my special day so amazing - another post will be coming up hopefully soon.