HOW TO ADMIT DEFEAT

Devon McArthur
3 min readMay 27, 2020

Defeat, simply out is when you haven’t won. Now this can be translated into a few categories where we classify winning as different things. For me, its when I don’t achieve my super complicated and unachievable goals which could be realistically achieved in the long term, but no… For me it’s when I hope to achieve the unthinkable in a matter of days, and ambitiously done in a few weeks.

I like the way wikihow says it the best, shake hands with opponent and congratulating them.

I am a sore loser, I hate losing, and what I hate the most is losing to myself… Or losing in ways that I can’t help but lose because of being over ambitious with goals. I played semi-professional cricket two years ago and meant to go lay overseas where my professional contact was written up… And my visa dandy come through in time for me to leave which resulted to a termination of my contact. It doesn’t sound too bad, but I put all my heart and all of me into the game… To my future, all for it to be taken away like that. Now I mourned this death of mine as long as I could until, I simply accepted the fact couldn’t go, with my unbelievable chance was gone and not coming back. Worse than a break up that was. This was a place for me to start new, grab new opportunities that were thrown at me and believe me, I would have caught them. (Cricket pun)

Cricket Grounds in the UK.

This wasn’t defeat in the conventional sense, rather an intrapersonal version that deemed me unsuccessful in my chase of success which I saw as moving continents.

I couldn’t admit this defeat until I mourned my failure. So high strung on what could have been I was missing out on what was happening at the current state of time. I made new friends, tried religion, started writing to myself, tossing a relationship that wasn’t good for me at the time and many other things, I realised after what was happening but I wasn’t allowed to appreciate it as it was happening at the time because I did not allow myself.

Being mindful when I needed to didn’t seem relevant. Nothing did.

So from my personal experience I’d love to help someone who needs a little advice when they could be needing it the most.

1. Feel. This is the most important point, it’s what you need to do to feel yourself, not as a stranger to the world, but your own existence as, special. I needed to feel that.. So I went on hikes with my thoughts and cleared my mind. Tried new physical activities just to take the pressure out of my head, to let go of the emotional distress. It’s good to get the emotion out of you. Take however long you must to know your feelings, sources, types and levels of thought and feelings.

2. Accepting your feelings and admitting that they are yours and yours to deal with.

3. Taking control of what you feel and moving with the tide of emotions, every day will feel different, every day will be a rollercoaster of feelings.

4. Gracefully move on in the way of getting over those lost feelings and turn them into positives ones, there are positive’s everywhere, sometimes we are just too blinded to see them.

I sincerely hope I assisted someone by reading this and by doing this improving a few seconds of their lives,

Thanking you gracefully,

Devon.

https://ny.curbed.com/2017/3/20/14968916/best-hiking-trails-nyc-day-trips-car-free

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Devon McArthur

Passionate about people, thinking and living.I do enjoy a rare dose of photography as well as too many coffees.