Vulner-ability

I think that out of all the things people have said to me in the past that annoy me the most, it’s this:

You’re too hard on yourself!

I find this to be incredibly annoying, because I kind of feel the opposite. I think I’m just idly awaiting for my life to turn around. That I don’t really have any expectations of myself and that I’m not capable of doing something so profoundly life changing as to feel that I’m enough. That’s just nonsense.

Of course, deep down, I know that they are all right. Stubbornness and strength don’t always go together.

I expect of myself the strength of knowing all the answers, being the best person, doing as people around me want me to. That my progress is not fast enough. That I’m too skinny, and that I’m lazy. That I rather lay around in bed all day than seizing the world outside.

I have had this notion in my head that “If I just end up pathetic, people will take care of me and stop expecting things from me”. Which, of course, is completely false, but also completely right.

When you don’t have a forward motion, people around you will raise their expectations of you, while you will lower your own intuition, but still beat yourself up over it. But when you have a lot of forward motion, people around you will tell you that you should relax for a while, while inside you’re going “I’ll just push a little further”, still not feeling like you’re enough.

But I have also learned that in order to reach this kind of vulnerability, we have to put yourself out there. Naked (metaphorically speaking, of course), in front of an audience and dare to show them who we are. And that’s hard. Incredibly hard. And it takes time, which we seem to forget all along: that self-esteem and confidence doesn’t just happen with age. It happens with hard work and belief.

So many of us are capable of so much more than we think. So many of us have such insane expectations of ourselves that we, instead of taking steps forward, get pushed back by ourselves.

The biggest lesson we have to learn is to not take a step back when all of our instincts scream “STEP BACK”. That the power of our mind so is immensely powerful that if we are capable of driving ourselves into isolation, deep depression and self-criticism so easily, we are also capable of turning it around - completely.

Because if you think about it, it’s possible to just spin it all around.

People will say that no one can be completely happy all the time, which is true. Our brains probably couldn’t handle that, not to mention how much you’d annoy everyone else.

But you know how it is when you’re at a terrible place in your life: 95% of your days suck so profoundly that you are just annoyed with everything. But there seems to at least be these small beacons of light coming when you least expect them, and they also disappeared before you even had time to relax and enjoy the pleasant change.

And I argue that it’s possible to do this with sadness, depression, despair and fear.

That 95% of the time (or whatever, statistics unease me), we can actually be content with our lives, because it’s unreasonable to think that we can feel joy and happiness all the time. But in those 5%, those fleeting moments that come out of the blue, and disappear quicker than ever, can be the bad ones too.

And what it takes is devotion. Believing. Because the power of belief is one of the strongest mental processes we have, in my opinion. I mean, just look at religion.

We can easily produce the worst case, catastrophic instances in our heads which we thoroughly believe will happen. Irrational thinking in its forte. On the contrary, we seem incapable of believing that the best case scenario will happen. And that all comes down to our fear of being vulnerable.

And I think a lot of that has to do with the way society works today. We are supposed to be strong. To be capable. To not show fear, and to contribute. Not let our worries affect others around us. We have therapists for that, right?

I think that what we all have to realize, myself included, is that we are enough the way we are, and that social pressure and expectations is just a construct of our mind that is hindering us from really living out the kind of life that we want to live.