Happy Easter Sunday everyone!
I hope the easter bunny brought you an appropriate amount of chocolate today.
You know, enough to enjoy yourself, but not enough that you have buyer’s remorse in the first hour of opening anything wrapped in delightfully fragile foiled packaging and regretting it HARD for the rest of the day, no matter how much salad you have at lunch to return your blood sugar levels back down to a number compatible with sustaining human life.
Or has that point past by looooong ago and we are now seriously considering bulimia as a lifestyle choice, if only the gross feeling in your guts would stop?
I mean, we’ve all been there. Not even necessarily about chocolate. I’ve done it with honey roasted cashews. That was a long day. And donut holes. Good times. But also something I left behind a long time ago. But enough about me and my holier than thou-iness.
Today of all days, I was considering a few conversations I’ve had about people asking the genuine question “Why don’t I do the thing I know is good for me, even when I know I want to?”
Well… The short version is: You suck.
Or at least, you think you do.
Calm down, Cardi, I’m going to explain.
No, I don’t know anything about you. No, I don’t know your life. Because I’ve never met you before. But that… Wait, wait, wait. No I haven’t been spying on you. Because its illegal! And I don’t know you! How could I spy on someone I don’t know?!? But… Look, I’m not even talking about you specifically! Good grief can you let me explain? Please? Thank you…
Anyway…
Cardi’s concerns about how I know you suck aside, the point that matters is that you THINK you suck. And I’m not necessarily talking about all the ways in which life is challenging and that sometimes you don’t quite come through in flying colours when the kids wont shut up about who gets the last crème’ egg, and you loose your shit. That’s not the “sucking” I mean. That’s mostly just you being human.
No, I mean the times when you say something that you want to do, or finish, or achieve, or change, or just think about differently, and you don’t. You just don’t.
Why don’t you?
Is it because you have chosen something so unbelievably ambitious that even Elon Musk would spit out his aloe vera water in surprise? Possibly.
Is it because you really are so lame that you just aren’t physically and mentally capable of impacting your world in any way at all? Pretty long odds. I mean, you’ve successfully survived life this long, you must have picked up a couple of tricks by now. Look, you are reading something that required the purchase and operation of a device that isn’t all that easy. So there’s that.
Is it because you’ve picked something that you don’t really care about, therefore paying lip service to it isn’t a big deal? Probably.
But why pay lip service to it?
Why waste that precious mental capacity and the breath needed to vocalise the words “I’m going to eat less cheese!”
Because you know that thing you think and say would be good for you. Your health, your thoughts, your feelings, you people, your work, your life. All of the above. And you’re not wrong. So, we KNOW that. But we still don’t do it.
Why?
Because you don’t believe a damned word of it. Not the general premise of it. But that you can and will do it. You think you suck, even if it is a great idea. And if you think you suck, despite the greatness of the idea, you wont stick to it. You’ll sabotage yourself. In all those subtle little ways that just fall beneath the radar, either not obvious enough to pick up, or sailing right through the blind spot you’ve create for the habits that are now soooo automatic, we don’t even notice they’re there any more.
“Fine, we suck” I hear you refrain, “What do I do about it, if you’re so damned smart and holier than thou and spying-ish?”
First, acknowledge WHY you think you suck.
Maybe you got told you couldn’t do something as a child. And that stuff tends to stick. Maybe you got told who you are, regardless of your thoughts on that matter, and now that’s just who you think you are. It’s now just a fundamental part of who you think you are now.
And if that’s who we think we are, we will act in a way that lets that particular idea of ourselves be true. Because its easier that way. That way, we don’t have to think about scary stuff like who we really are (as opposed to who we are told we are) and what we might want from life accordingly.
So, if that is possibly true of us, then is it also possible that if we’ve tried to change before? To act out of character with who we are told we are, and because we didn’t actually believe in the actions we were taking, we didn’t invest and follow through with them? That we sabotaged them in a subconscious way because it didn’t make sense relative to all those beliefs we hold about who we are told we are?
And when we try to change things and fail, what does that teach us? Well, when we are in that frame of mind, fighting against what everyone’s told us is the reality of us, I imagine it feels shitty. Like we ARE failures. That we suck. Hard.
This… is why most people don’t get anywhere different when it comes to diets and money and work and life and love.
The problem is, no matter what you are doing in the public eye, there is always someone watching that we never consider.
You.
You are ALWAYS watching.
You know when you’ve cheated on your diet, even when your trainer doesn’t.
You know that your imposter syndrome is real and that really, deep down, you are a terrible person, even though your partner thinks you are the best thing since chocolate eggs filled with Turkish delight. That’s of course assuming you think you deserve a partner and don’t actively sabotage the relationship because its messing with the belief that you suck and it’s only a matter of time before they find out the despicable-ness that is you…
Basically, you have aaaaallllllll this evidence telling you that things won’t work out for you, because the attempts that have been made in the past have conflicted with who you were TOLD you were, and now that is cutting the ideas that you consciously know are good for you down before they’ve even been given a genuine chance.
Which adds more weight to the idea that you suck.
To quote the ever-wise Homer Simpson, ”They sure did suck last night. They just plain sucked. They were the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked.”
That’s what you think about you. Because you have no evidence to the contrary that you don’t. When it comes to specific things anyway. And because its easier than reinventing the wheel, we keep acting that out. Because we think that’s all there is.
I’m here to tell you, its not.
That is OLD shit.
So, secondly.
If you can acknowledge why you THINK you suck, can we appreciate that the only one capable of changing that is you. And its you investing in beliefs that things don’t have to stay that way. That one step at a time is how we slowly but surely show ourselves and that ever present part of us that is watching, that you ARE capable of taking steps to align with those ideas you know are good for you.
So, as always, it comes down to this question…
What do you want?
Because you can have it.
But you need to stack some wins for yourself. Convince yourself that, no matter how small those wins might be, you can move in the direction of what you genuinely want for yourself.
It takes time to act against those old bullshit beliefs that you suck, and investment. And vigilance. And a bit of hope. But you can do it.
You are always watching.
Give yourself something more than the same old same old.
Give yourself a chance to believe things wont always be the same, if you know you don’t want it to be the same.
And be kind if you mess up here and there. You are always watching that too. You’ve had enough of people convincing you of what you do and don’t deserve. Don’t add to it yourself, because your word counts for more than you think when it comes to you.
Think your own damned thoughts.
Feel your own damned feelings.
Live your own damned life.
You don’t suck. So… show yourself.
Be kind, be smart, be your best you. No bar fights.
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” Rumi
Comments