This is Not an Advice Column
We are socialized to believe that there is something wrong with us. There is always something that needs to be improved, fixed, changed out for something else. We need to stay in motion, but take the time for self-care in the stillness. We run 5ks, we become yoga instructors, we bullet journal and switch out our Covey charts for the Four-Hour Work Week.
I am hopelessly addicted to self-improvement articles and self-help books, but I almost never change. I spend more time reading about being productive than actually being productive. I have longer lists for why I will never be a better person than how I can be a better person.
When I was in college, I used to play off my low self-esteem by joking that “the world needs middle managers too”. I still believe this, even if it’s never been my goal in life. I think deep down, I expected that I would always aim high and fall short. That I would fail to get better at anything I was doing. Or facing.
I have Bipolar Disorder, type 2, which means that I am prone to long stretches of depression mixed with brief bouts of hypomania and a splash of stability. I have spent over 15 years trying to get better, many of those years lost in the feeling that there was nothing that I could do at all. I have, however, developed two valuable mindsets that have kept me afloat:
1. When it comes to mental illness, I will never get better.
2. Self-awareness is the key to success.
When I say that I will never get better, I mean that I will never be cured. I will always have bad days. I will always have bad thoughts, and I will always make mistakes. I may need to cycle through different medications, change therapists, check myself into the hospital and overshare with exhausted friends in order to stay alive. Better is not an end point. Better is, at best, a process. Better is at worst, the most exhausting journey you will ever go on.
That brings me to self-awareness. The one and only line in my long buried Tinder profile was “Nothing if not painfully self aware”. If you are lucky, you will have friends, family, and health care professionals to help you along the way to understanding why you are the way you are and why you do the things you do. If you’re less lucky, you’ll spend two and a half years in a foreign country with too much time on your hands and nothing to do but analyze your thoughts and play solitaire on your iPod.
Knowing why you are the way you are, though, is not as important as recognizing that you are who you are. And some things will never change. For me, that’s having a mental illness diagnosis. It’s also my childlike sense of curiosity, my insatiable desire to see and learn about the rest of the world, and my unbreakable love and commitment to my friends and family.
These things can be hard to figure out, but they can guide you towards deciding whether you should spend $30 and an afternoon coloring in circles and crosshatches into a notebook, or get yourself out the door to a yoga class. Or maybe reading countless lists of how to make $1,000 in a month your first time writing on Medium and ten simple steps to becoming the best entrepreneur ever works for you.
So long as you know that, I wish you the best. Maybe it will make you better, or maybe it will hold you back from discovering what that really means for you.
