3 Years Into Personal Growth, Finding Limits Is Hard

When you push yourself to grow, finding comfortable limits is harder than you might expect.

Leigh Victoria Phan, MS
5 min readJun 16, 2022
Illustration of a person practicing self-healing in pursuit of personal growth.
Illustration Courtesy of VectorMine

Personal growth means something a little different to every person. We’re all pursuing unique goals and no two people are exactly alike. Personal development journies run on different timelines and look quite different for everyone. While so much varies, there are some commonalities too—especially in the roadblocks you might end up facing,

The pitfall I keep stumbling into on my journey is figuring out what my limits are. The biggest pillars of my personal growth journey are being a more active writer and artist, working on my physical and mental health, and being more present in my day-to-day life. It may be just three things, but actually making progress on them has required some dramatic lifestyle changes over the past three years. Since I’m trying to craft myself into a better version of myself, it can be hard to realize when I fall into bad old habits of overdoing it.

If you’ve experienced a lot of stagnation, it’s hard to slow down when you need to.

“Self-care means giving yourself permission to pause.” — Cecilia Tran

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Leigh Victoria Phan, MS

Brooklyn-based writer and poet. Designer in NYC. Drinks books and loves coffee. Has an MS from NYU in Integrated Design & Media. Working on an MFA in Fiction.