Rachel Yoder
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read

How to be Selfish

Temple of Doom

When I talk out loud, most of it is about other people. What I love about them, what bothers me about them, things they said that make me think or things they did that baffle and confuse. Most of what I think about quietly is myself. How I feel, what I want, the multitude of ways in which I am inadequate or too great for this dirty rock. I am trying to bring the things I say and the things I think into greater harmony. I would like to be more selfish.

I was raised in a Christian household, the brand of which varied from hardcore Pentecostal through tempered evangelical all the way to Roman Catholicism. All of which I now have varying degrees of disdain and occasional respect for, but the common thread was sacrifice. Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice, giving his life for our sins, and so in turn we must pay it forward by sacrificing ourselves over and again for other people, the greater good, the glory of God, anything really. The problem with a living sacrifice, I was told by a youth pastor once, is that it keeps trying to crawl off the alter. Aside from the vague Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom imagery that this evokes, it also proves to me that sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake is inherently anti-survivalist. We crawl away from things that try to kill us, that’s a universal safety switch built into most living things. To go against that urge and be a martyr is not only stupid; it’s calling evolution or the creator or whoever gave us this safety switch a big fat dummy. Millions of years of people trying to not die can’t be wrong, and I don’t go to church anymore, so why is it so hard to get rid of the thinking that the only way to show true love is by making myself smaller, my needs less important, and my life a throwaway commodity?

I’m working my way through The Artist’s Way, part of which is writing a three-page stream of consciousness every morning. These morning pages are fundamental to the process of rediscovering your creative flow, and they’ve also proven themselves to be quite enjoyable. What they are starting to reveal, somewhat uncomfortably, are my deep-rooted resentments and invisible obligations, all because I have lost a lot of the ability to know what I want and how to do it. It could be as simple as making time in the day for creative writing, knowing that if I say I am busy during a certain period of time, no one will be upset, no one will shout and rage and demand that I free myself up, and most importantly, no one will notice if I don’t do it and sacrifice my time to be available to their whims should they want to do something with me. Those realizations are almost sweet and frivolous, when I compare them to the deeper and darker understandings that come up to the surface, things like not knowing what I really want from life and not being sure how to ask for emotional support from my friends and lover, being unable to set boundaries on my own capacities to support others and allowing myself to be an emotional ATM from which I feel constantly overdrawn.

Obviously, I’m working on it. But what might have to happen is a period of selfishness. I’ll still share my gummy sweets and my last Cheetos, but I don’t need to share my time and my spirit so readily with people and situations who haven’t even asked for it. I don’t need to be a living sacrifice anymore. In fact, one day it might even be ok for me to ask other people to sacrifice things for me, heaven forbid! The fact that I see self-preservation and healthy boundaries as selfishness reveals how far I need to come, but sometimes we have to say these things out loud and as ridiculously as New Year’s resolutions to go sky diving in order to land in some healthy middle ground. Aim for the stars, land in the gutter, or in this case, aim to be a class A narcissist, hopefully wind up being able to say no to things I don’t want to do and have at least one priority in a day. It’s a start at least, probably up there with realizing the only one I’ve been sacrificing for all this time is myself, and that I can give myself the permission to stop and walk right off that alter.

Rachel Yoder

Written by

One foot on either side of the pond. You can hear my voice on the RTÉ Situationships podcast.

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