Crystal Aura Gaze

DAY 20: [KALI] How have you changed recently?

Kali is the Hindu goddess of destruction and transformation.

I’m a lot more open, social, and confident in who I am, in the past several years. I’ve always been very closed and a little bit antisocial. And from 2020 to early 2022, I really shut myself away from the world, and surprisingly that didn’t really have much to do with the pandemic and quarantine. Even when things were opening back up again, I was choosing to keep myself isolated – not at all for health fears but for my own personal needs. It was an interesting journey because I spent most of my life believing that I needed to get away from people and always be by myself, and it took that experience of being completely on my own, to understand that I really do need social connection to thrive. I call it my Henry David Thoreau Era.

There’s been plenty of times in my life when I was more social, like at the start of college when I was really eager to make more friends and meet new people, but it’s like there was always a part of me that resisted letting people in. And I am still very introverted, I will always need some space and alone-time, I am still overwhelmed and drained by too much social interaction. But I feel like I am more open about who I am, I am more proud to be myself rather than what people expect me to be.

This is something that I have noticed since starting my new job last fall. It was very quick for people to get to know me right way. Looking back, at my last job, or at my college, it took so long for new people to actually know me, and even after months to years it seems like not many people ever found out who I actually was. I’m a lot more open about who I am, I am quicker to speak my mind and say how I truly feel, I say what I want to say even if I know that nobody in the room is going to agree with me. Different personalities are what make the world such a colorful place and I’m finally at the point where I am proud to share that I have a very different perspective in life than others may have.