And if you truly believed you were unstoppable… ?
A meditation on beliefs about self that serve us, and the ones that don’t (but that we insist on carrying with us over the long haul). Sounds ridiculous? It is.
Dear Ian*,
Your encouragement really challenged me to think, “What would I do [differently] — how would I think and invest and act — if I really, truly believed that I was unstoppable?” Not in the sense of believing that I’m always right, but rather believing (consistently) that I’m really capable.
I’ve been realizing a pattern: I live most of my days with a “fixed” mindset as opposed to a “growth” mindset. I get bogged down under the weight of perfectionism, feeling like I — and my work — am inadequate for today (because if I was really on top of it I would have planned ahead, researched ahead, have had this [whatever it is] more developed). So basically, nothing I ever do is ever good enough, because I always could have invested more ahead of time; it always could have been better.
So I’m guilt-tripping myself all the time about how I spent yesterday, because today I’m not happy with where I’m at. And it’s only in making this explicit do I realize that this is entirely stupid. It’s an unsustainable way to see the world… why even try when nothing is ever going to be good enough? Why even teach when someone else would have known more, conveyed it better?
I feel like the further I’ve progressed in studies, the more I feel like (and fear) I know absolutely nothing, and the more anxious I get about knowing nothing while letting other people think I do.
So about 70% of life is a mind-game, in which I’m generally losing, just trying to stay afloat while battling impostor syndrome. The other 30% of my waking hours are actually quite nice, filled with interesting discoveries by a somewhat confident individual who really enjoys both the serious philosophical moments of life as well as the whimsical, silly ones.
I know I’m not bipolar, and I don’t believe I have a psychological disorder, so there may likely be quite a few other people out there experiencing this. So thank you, really, for your encouragement. It’s so incredibly important to have people who believe in us, even when we struggle to believe in ourselves.
This was a note I wrote to a friend who sent some timely encouragement in response to one of my typically too-philosophical-for-social-media posts on — you got it — social media. If you found it at all useful, great. If you can’t relate at all, even better!
*absolutely not the name of the person to whom I actually wrote this. But also a great name.
