Taking My Own Advice
One day last year I started asking myself what would happen if someone were to actually take their own advice? What if that someone was me?
The following is the first in a series of me giving and taking my own advice. It is a specific form of self-therapy that I’ve come up with to help myself when I’m stuck in my head, need to figure something out, make a decision, and take action. It works like this:
1. Let myself be stuck in my head, feel what I’m feeling and write everything down unfiltered, unedited (I made some slight grammatical edits for the sake of this post), and as if I were writing to a compassionate, wise, stranger.
2. Now that I’ve felt it and got it all out, it’s time to let it go and get out of my head. I reread what I wrote in section one and respond as if I were an empathetic, compassionate, but uninvolved counselor/therapist. Analyze the situation, tell the truth no matter how hard it is to say or hear, and give advice that is objective as possible.
3. Reread section two. Absorb and internalize it. And crucially, take action. When the action has been completed or significant enough progress has been made, return and write section three to report back on how it went. This may take hours, days, or months.
This process has been an incredibly helpful tool for me. If you decide to give it a try, let me know how it works for you.
Dear Self,
I feel completely overwhelmed.
Where do I even begin?
Over the last year and a half or so, I have been on an incredible journey of self-discovery and improvement. At first, I didn’t know what was happening. It started out incredibly gradual and effortless. I was focused on a diet that my friend and I were doing, but then, in support of that diet, I started making improvements to adjacent areas of my life and that snowballed to the point where I was a completely different person inside and out within just a few months. I was physically healthier and I was mentally and emotionally stronger and more aware.
At some point I noticed all the changes that I had made in such a short amount of time and I panicked. I felt as if I was running down an ever-steeper hill and I didn’t know how long I’d be able to keep my feet beneath me. I decided to take a break for a bit and stop pressuring myself to improve. I lost some progress and my life, for a time, went back to how it was before all my work. It was horrible. I don’t know if I was always that miserable and unaware, or if the knowledge of how my life could be made anything less than that unbearable by comparison, but either way, after about a month, I couldn’t take it anymore and I went back to my new self.
Since then I’ve made some major self-discoveries and have been trying to work on growing in those areas. The biggest of which is the realization that I have a very muted sense of my own identity and almost no self-worth or self-esteem to speak of. Because of this, I latch onto people, become possessive and jealous, and tend to do whatever it takes to gain people’s approval and validation.
Living with the knowledge of this problem and my striving to correct it has been the theme of the last six months of my life. It has been overwhelming and exhausting. I’ve read dozens of books, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting, and I’ve made lot of changes. I’ve worked hard at this. I’ve worked SO hard (As I write this, I am realizing for the first time how much effort and dedication I’ve put into this. I don’t think I’ve ever given myself credit for that). And I’ve worked alone because I’ve come to realize that I’m the only one who can truly solve this. But at times, all the effort that I put in just made things worse for me. All I saw were my deficiencies, my weaknesses, and my inability to overcome them.
I feel as if I’m in a catch-22. I know I need to start doing things for myself and to stop doing things because of other people. I know I need to start valuing myself so that I no longer need the validation of others. I know I need to become stronger and self-reliant. But I feel too mentally and emotionally weak to continue to do this on my own.
I sometimes talk to friends or family about all of this, but this brings up two problems. One, the conversation tends to turn into me seeking validation for my efforts, and/or two, when they help, it only makes me feel more useless and weak because I feel as if I needed help.
All of this culminates in the fact that I am exhausted and overwhelmed by my thoughts, by my emotions, by my constant introspection, and most of all, by my relentless quest for self-reliance.
I don’t want to go back to how I was again. It was nearly unbearable. But at the same time, I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up.
Sincerely,
Me