Life compass - Reflection

The life compass technique is a very unique one. While using this, you get to evaluate how you are feeling that day at a specific moment. The scale goes from 1 to 3, 1 being weak and 3 great. What is it you evaluate? Your mind, body, spirit, and emotions.  After the evaluation, you comment about what’s going on in your life that may affect your whole being. Using this technique was a totally different experience from the Journal. In overall, my scores were 2, meaning that most of the time I’m ok.

It is not until I finished this project that I had the opportunity to compare each writing technique, the life compass vs. the journal. I liked more the journal experience. I had the liberty to talk and discuss topics that I wanted, disconnected with the world. I was not obligated to talk about myself all the time. Somehow I always found a topic that engaged me and distracted me. It gave me fluidity and I, for the first time, enjoyed the writing.

The life compass was a little more difficult for me. I had to deal with the problems that I was facing that day, those that I wanted to avoid. The part that I very much liked was that I noticed how every part of me is connected. Whenever one was not doing well, it somehow affected the others.

Now, let’s talk about my “scores”. One thing that I realized was that I was not myself whenever I had a test. My mood changed from the week before until the week after the test. Stress is something that, sadly, takes over me and dominates me from head to toes. Everyone tells me the same thing, that I have to learn on how to deal and reduce it. I have followed the majority of the advices they give me, but it’s always present. Beside the university, things that I can’t control also cause me a great amount of stress. I like to be in control. Beside this, I also noticed that my physical state was one of my strongest area. Most of the time I got 2 or 3. Also, whenever my mind was down, my emotions and spirit were also down. Because I’m not a morning person, I used to get low scores on the days that I wrote in the morning. I believe this may be because I am still sleepy or simply I woke up annoyed for no reason.

There are good and bad days. Some have certain impact on you. I selected one of my entries that shocked me the most to share it with you. Before reading it again, I was aware that it had been one of the worst days of my semester. What I did not remember, though, was all the details I wrote down to describe and include every detail that affected me that day. It was as if I was reliving it. I am a generalized epileptic patient who has been diagnosed for over a year now. Eight months had passed since I didn’t had a seizure episode. It was not until Saturday, October 29, that I had a relapse and had multiples seizure episodes, as I always had. This crisis has been of of the hardest yet because the three episodes I had were one hour apart each one. My family was always with me until the doctors came and stabilized me. I don’t like to tell everyone the details of every episode I have because automatically, most of the people, begin to see and treat you different. Also, it is still very hard to be open about this topic that influences my life so much.

            

In conclusion, although I liked more Natalie Goldberg’s technique, I enjoyed a lot this one too. It was something very unique and different. You get to see yourself from another perspective. For 5 minutes you dedicate those few minutes to yourself. At first, it was hard to me to adapt but eventually I got used to it and began to analyze how I was feeling on a specific day and what was bothering me. I, for instance, described everything as much as I could so that I could get it out of me. This technique helped me guide myself and notice which areas do I have to work more on. As every human, every now and then I have mood swings. Thanks to this, now I know how to deal with situations that affects me instead of ignoring them until I exploded, like I did before.  It was the only time in the day in which I had “me time” and I certainly took advantage of it and used it. I will continue to do this because of all of the things I mentioned before. Here’s a graph which shows my overall scores in every area:

So if you did your math, that would be a 8/12. This means that most of the time I'm ok.