Death by 1,000 Acts of Insecurity

I created this somewhat terrible graph / drawing the other day for a vlog titled “continuity” which is really about learning how to be our authentic selves, regardless of the platform or medium, regardless of whether it’s online and offline.

I think this is hard for a number of obvious and not-so-obvious reasons but it’s been on my mind quite a bit since I started my video project almost 100 days ago.

You can see the graph here:

What I was trying to encapsulate and explain is essentially this: As we grow and mature as people we find ourselves in a constant tug-of-war between how we present ourselves and who we really are.

The goal, of course, is to create as much alignment between these two things as possible. Or, as I’ve said, to be able to create such an incredible amount of continuity that no one could ever accuse you of being different (or acting different) in a variety of different contexts and environment.

Now, I once believed that this wasn’t actually possible and that context was in control and that context ultimately demanded different personas the moment you walked into them.

The end result was nothing short of absolute fatigue and I found myself spending more time acting parts instead of actually performing well. You might immediately think of the professional world and that would also be true but I’m actually talking about the much broader scope of relational engagement in my life.

I was, let’s put it plainly… acting everywhere, all the time.

And it eventually landed me in the hospital and the ER where I was told that the pressure of building complex emotional, mental, and physiological models for every single professional and personal scenario would ultimately kill me.

This is not hyperbole, by the way. I was, in fact, dying. Death by 1,000 acts of insecurity and make-believe. I had had enough and my body was reacting poorly to the results.

The red and blue line, to go back to my poor man’s model above, was so off base, was so outside the bounds of who I was, that without a dramatic shift back to normal I would be irrecoverable.

So I did what was needed to be done and I quit everything. Assumed that my life and the patterns that I had created and the schedule that I had built was fundamentally flawed and wrong and built a new one from scratch.

Some of this included working out daily, which I still do today, and the results have been phenomenal, like, losing 27 pounds which has, as you might imagine, directly impacted my mental health as well.

I’m not embarrassed by these pictures, by the way, because I love my Ninja Turtle pajamas. Best recognize.

But this doesn’t mean that I don’t keep fighting the temptation to walk my way backwards into situations that are unhealthy or to lightly project a person who I know that I’m not.

No, the battle still rages war within me. The fight will never end. The hope is that we will eventually win more than we lose but the losses still come. What is different, now, than before is that I recognize the losses earlier and I can charter a corrective course faster and more effectively.

Sometimes I can save the “ship” before it gets Titanic’d but this is never guaranteed and my at-bat percentage is pretty bad. I’m working on it… and I know you are too.

Here’s the full vlog and I would love your continued thoughts.

Let’s fight the good fight. Never stop. Never give in. Always forward.

Originally published at John Saddington.