5 Things I Want to Tell Myself Right Now
Instead of reading self-help articles
I’m 25 years old and because 25 is an even quarter of a life (given that all goes to plan and I die peacefully in my sleep at 100 years old at precisely the same moment as my 100-year-old cocker spaniel and 102-year-old husband) and because a decade just ended in Earth time, I’m in the mood to reflect on what I know.
There are a lot of articles about what you wish you could go back in time and tell yourself. I’m a huge fan of articles like these (as you’ll soon discover). But I also find that many times, I already know what I need to hear.
What follows is some advice of my own that I’d like to remind myself of more often. Hard-won gleanings from 25 years on the planet.
No doubt I will look back on this article in a few years and have some footnotes. But I’m going to give myself permission to write what is true for me right now because I’ve learned that if I try to get it perfect, I probably won’t do it at all. This has played out over and over in my life, even for simple things like picking out a bunch of flowers. I can sit at the grocery store for thirty minutes trying to find the PERFECT bunch of flowers that express the exact mood of my inner soul. The weight of finding perfection can lead me to go home flowerless, having become so anxious that I abandoned the process altogether.
So even if I look back on what I write now and cringe, it will be worse to go home flowerless.
1. Enjoy who you are, now.
I love articles about the advice you would give to your younger self. It’s comforting to learn from others’ wisdom, and it’s a good exercise to mentally give some love and a hug to your aching 13-year-old self.
My 13-year-old self was a bit depressed, so very self-conscious, and had no idea that she was really cool. She cared so much about everybody. She worked hard. She read all the time and wrote and made skits with her siblings. I wish she knew she was great.
I don’t want to be in my thirties and look back on my 20 something self and realize that I never appreciated all the great things about my 20 something self while I was 20 something. I want to give myself the love I deserve now.
There are a lot of different ways to do this, but I think a good place to start is with this anonymous quote:
“It doesn’t make sense to call ourselves ugly, because we don’t really see ourselves. We don’t watch ourselves sleeping in bed, curled up and silent with chests rising and falling with our own rhythm. We don’t see ourselves reading a book, eyes fluttering and glowing. You don’t see yourself looking at someone with love and care inside your heart. There’s no mirror in your way when you’re laughing and smiling and happiness is leaking out of you. You would know exactly how bright and beautiful you are if you saw yourself in the moments where you are truly yourself.”
Think of the way your heart swells when you walk in a room and see your partner talking baby gibberish to your dog. Or when you’re watching your best friend hunch over in laughter. Or when you see your dad shuffling around in his morning sweats.
Think of these beautiful moments you’ve collected from the people you love and realize that while you were watching them, they were watching you. Your loved ones walk around their lives carrying a thousand tender pictures of you.
Watch yourself like you watch the people you love. Although you don’t have a second set of eyes, you can write down a list of qualities you love about yourself. You can ask the people you love what they love about you. You can write down in exact detail a moment that made you proud of yourself.
You’re going to learn a lot more. You’re going to continue to evolve. But that’s later. The future will come to fruition, but who you are now is who you were working hard for when you were 13, 18, 20. You have already fruited, baby.
2. To pursue creative projects, craft your own forge.
forge \ ˈfȯrj \ — a special fireplace, hearth, or furnace in which metal is heated before shaping; to move ahead slowly; progress steadily; to form or make, especially by concentrated effort
We all need a healthy sense of pressure to get things done. American work culture does not bequeath a healthy sense of pressure. In order to accomplish creative work, I need to leave behind some of the structures that I first developed related to productivity. I need to design a new kind of forge. It’s important to be picky about what is and is not allowed in my metaphorical forge. Here’s a quick list.
Not Allowed:
- Perfectionism
- Internet Comments
- Low blood sugar and the melodramatic thoughts that come with it
- Negative self-talk
- Opinions from people who have never tried to make something
Allowed:
- Everything from Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott (especially her essay on shitty first drafts)
- Gratitude
- Therapy
- Kind self-talk
- Morning Pages from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way
- Exercise
- Petting dogs
Crafting an inner forge is what allows me to tap into my resilience. This means that I won’t write furiously for 3 days and then fall into a pit of despair and not write for 8 months. It means telling myself that I am enough. It means choosing small amounts of progress most of the time.
In Julia Cameron’s words, “you are the spring you have been waiting for.” It is not a future or more perfect me who can do the things I want to do. It is the me who exists now. The me who is maybe curled up on the couch. Who maybe has dumb credit card debt. I am the spring I have been waiting for.
3. You’ll learn the same things in a new way over and over again.
I devour articles titled, “10 things I Wish I Could Tell My 20 Something Self” or, “Life Lessons I Wish I Learned In My Twenties.” Sometimes I feel like if I just read enough articles, I can intellectually hack my way through personal development hurdles without having to learn things the hard way. The hurdles of my life preemptively hurdled by my big, juicy brain.
But I’ve learned there are no shortcuts to learning life lessons. Reading something about life is different from living it. When I scroll through Instagram and read something clean and tidy like, “Love is the answer,” memorizing that phrase doesn’t mean that I know how to do it.
Choosing love is often the answer, but what does it mean to choose love after realizing that my own selfishness hurt somebody? What does it mean to choose love when I’m mired in debt and can’t stand myself for my own choices? Navigating through specificities and across contexts allows me to understand the same concept in a deeper way.
Big juicy brains don’t save anybody from having to walk their bodies through the murky depths of the human experience.
4. Everything in my life is directly related to how I talk to myself.
I came to therapy in May of last year, having spent most of my life really needing it. There was a bit of a backlog.
The thing I identified as my most pressing concern? An almost constant sense of despair that underwrote my days; grocery store runs, fun nights out with friends, and work were all tinged with anxiety and dread. It was as if there was a leaky faucet inside of me that poisoned any sense of calm or contentment.
That was such a fun night! Drip…
I can’t believe I said that. I bet everybody thinks I’m annoying. Do I have enough friends?
Wow, that was a stressful day at work. Drip…
Now you’re exhausted and have no energy for the work you really want to be doing — writing! You’ll never succeed because you’re tired and just want to watch Netflix. You’re actually pretty lazy.
Okay, I got a lot of healthy stuff at the grocery store. Drip…
Now I just need to cook it all and pack it up for healthy lunches so I can eat better this week. That seems like it will take up most of my Sunday. Wow, that’s depressing. And then it’s back to work already? What’s the point in working so hard just so I can stay healthy enough to spend all of my time at work?
It’s like my life is narrated by Stephen King; even the light and happy moments are laced with foreboding. Eventually, despite my best efforts, my leaky faucet starts to feel more like a leaky geyser…
…and I end up doing something self-destructive or melodramatic like declare that my life potential is over or blame my problems on a career choice instead of a mental health issue.
Once, in one of these leaky-faucet-becomes-geyser moments, I sobbed on the bed to my boyfriend and wailed between gasps, “NOBODY IN THE WORLD IS AS NICE TO ME AS I AM TO THEM.” He covered his mouth, squinched his eyes, and . . . laughed at me. Like any self-respecting geyser, I quickly turned my emotional fire-hose on him.
I use this example to illustrate that I felt pretty sure that I knew what I would be working on in therapy. Part of me hoped that I could just be prescribed a pill that tightened the screws on my emotional life and made the dark, heavy feeling disappear.
After working with me for a few weeks, my therapist said, “Actually, your most pressing concern is your negative self-talk.” She said all my negative judgments and spirals were maladaptive thinking patterns, and that they could be changed. Then she gave me a worksheet. Take a second and read through this magic.
Before coming to therapy, I had no idea that these thinking patterns were maladaptive. What mental health professionals call “catastrophizing” I call being prepared for the worst. What they call “overgeneralization” I call seeing a real pattern about how I’m a bad person. And their last one, “emotional reasoning” really got me. What do you mean, my feelings aren’t always indicative of a deep truth? What else is there? Do you know that I can Animorph into a god damn GEYSER?
What I eventually realized is that the patterns that I thought were keeping me safe and grounded in life were trapping me in self-defeating circles of negativity, melodrama, and victimhood. My therapist told me to experiment with catching these maladaptive thoughts in the moment and working through them by using the chart in the worksheet.
I printed out 30 of these puppies and stuck them in a folder that I kept in my purse. Whenever I felt especially caught up in negativity or despair, I filled out one of these sheets. Even at work, I would take my purse and go to the bathroom, dumping my negativity at the same time as my Chipotle lunch bowl. It worked every time.
Situation: At work. Answering emails.
Automatic Thought: I hate this job. I feel so trapped. I don’t know how to get into the job I really want, which is writing and acting. I don’t feel like I’ll “make it.”
Feeling/Behavior: Stop working. Go on Facebook. Look at people’s lives that I’m jealous of. Google “I’m depressed”. Feel jealous, anxious, panicky.
Alternative Thought: This job does suck, but I have the power to get out of anything if it’s not meeting my needs. I’m a competent person who can support myself. My definition of “making it” is just to work hard at the things I love. Success will follow. Take yourself out on a date and drink a beer while you job-search and plan your next steps. You’ve got this.
Degree of Belief in Alternative Thought: 75%
New Feelings/Behaviors: I feel less anxious. I have a plan to change my situation. I can continue through my workday feeling less stressed.
The magic in this exercise is that it forces you to get specific about what is happening in your mind and understand the cyclical relationship between thoughts, behaviors, and feelings. For example, when I started therapy I did not have any semblance of a writing routine. Instead, I had a million buckets of anxiety about not having a writing routine. This is something that I wanted to change, but that my mindset trapped me inside of.
When I wrote prior to therapy, I thought about how bad my writing was, how much time I wasted not writing, and how I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever be a successful writer. Our thoughts affect how we act and feel, so I started to avoid writing because of how bad the thoughts made me feel. Avoiding writing made me feel bad, too, which led me to think worse and act worse.
Once I understood the way my thoughts, emotions, and behaviors were feeding each other, some of my despair lifted. The clouds are parting further as I discover how to hack this cycle by intentionally thinking different thoughts that lead to new behaviors and emotions, reinforcing a kinder and more productive cycle.
5. Also true: Sometimes the leaky faucet of despair is just you feeling the knife-edge of existence. That’s okay.
“All humans are aware of death. So we’re all a little bit sad all the time. That’s just the deal . . . but we don’t get offered any other ones. And if you try and ignore your sadness, it just ends up leaking out of you anyway. I’ve been there. And everybody’s been there. So don’t fight it.” — Eleanor, The Good Place
The dread I experienced before starting therapy was all-encompassing; I couldn’t enjoy my life. However, there are healthy levels of existential angst, anxiety, and sadness.
When I was ten years old, I woke up in the middle of the night and realized that one day my parents would die. I didn’t realize this as a far off, intellectual prospect. I realized this viscerally. I woke up to my body knowing that one day, I wouldn’t be able to talk to or see or smell them. They’d be gone and I’d be in the world without them. My chest ached and my stomach dropped. I sobbed hysterically in my bed. I cried myself to sleep and in the morning when I woke up, I remembered the pain but it was dulled by all of the thoughts about the school day ahead and getting to the bus stop on time. I continued on with my life.
There is nothing wrong with the depth of terror and grief I experienced in that moment. I wouldn’t wish to never experience that, because that would mean sticking my head in the sand, blind to the traumatizing reality of life; that we will lose the ones we love, that we will die.
There is something wrong if we are mired in sadness, fear, or indifference and it is keeping us from embracing our lives. But, the knowledge that we only have a certain number of moments together is the saddest thing in the world. I need to let it cut me and not dull it with workaholism or overconsumption or drugs or alcohol or any of the other million ways that humans have invented to feel like they don’t have to die. At the same time, I need to not live in that pain all the time and let it incapacitate me. It’s a balancing act that comes through accepting each moment as it comes. Like Jon Kabat-Zinn says,
“Life only unfolds in moments. The healing power of mindfulness lies in living each of those moments as fully as we can, accepting it as it is as we open to what comes next — in the next moment of now.”
Moments of terror and grief will surely come. So will funny cat GIFs, and weddings, and births, and belly laughs. That is the knife-edge deal we get. Embrace the uncomfortable-ness of that.
