When You're the "Problem."

I'll start my blog on a personal note (it's a personal blog, so--fitting).

I spend a lot of time Googling character traits, after good days and bad. "Am I a good person?" "Am I lazy?" "Am I where I should be?" "How to start over?" "How to be productive?" "Ok to eat expired canned foods?" (not every search is an existential zinger).

I'm no stranger to the following talk with my family: "Why do you sabotage yourself?" Self sabotage is a potent concept. The idea that you insist on making things harder for yourself, and can't get out of your own way. That yes, you're suffering from imposter syndrome . . . just like everyone else. Can't you see? Get over it.

What I'm wondering is this--every rational thought tells us that we are in the same position as our peers. (I dont mean to say that we all have the same experiences. We all know that race, gender, culture, socioeconomic background, religion, shape our upbringings and the way we move through the world in profound ways.) I'm talking about the fact that we all laugh at tons of the same jokes in the exact same way. You know the ones--those memes about being 10 and trying to carry seventeen grocery bags from mom's car trunk to the front door in size 12 flip flops because they were the only ones nearby. The mundane, everyday moments that become so entertaining in retrospect when we realize we've experienced them the same way.

So, yes. We are all the same. So, yes--it brings me comfort to look up those posts, those people who were/are the same as me, and to keep googling the the same self-help stuff I google.

But in the end--I never feel better. I don't find a resolution. I read the tips, I hear the advice, I scour all those experiences, good, bad, and ugly, that others serve up online. But it's always for nought, because all that's left afterwards is my life. And no article or blog post has ever given me "the answer" to my life. How could it?

It's hard not to know what you're doing wrong in life. But I posit that it's even harder to know your patterns, to know, theoretically, how to fix them, and to consciously make the same mistakes anyway. It's hard to be painfully aware of the "self-sabotage" that occupies your days. And it's hard to feel like you'd prefer it to be someone else's fault, but that you are, in the end, the only one you can blame. And despite the fact that we are all the same--that we are, astonishingly, thinking the exact same things, laughing at the exact same jokes, sharing the exact same insecurities (see supra, above) we still conclude that our internal struggles (whatever they may be) are unique, and that consequently, we are uniquely unequipped to deal with them.

In other words, it's hard to be "the problem."

But what if nobody is to blame? What if it's unnecessary to call the problem self sabotage? What if the problem is a hard day, week, month, or year? Anyone can get lost. What if we can do that thing that the blogs and instagram posts always say--be gentle with ourselves?

What if you set a 20 minute timer and do something good? Something you need to do. Maybe you needed to clear up those emails. Maybe you needed to clear the table and the dishes. Maybe you needed to make the bed. Maybe you needed to write in your journal, or finish writing a song. Maybe you just needed to breathe.

I guess all this to say... I'm pretty done with accusing myself of self sabotage, and I hope you are too. It's tiresome at best, and a self-fulfilling prophecy at worst.

Before I get off the soapbox, I'll add one more thing. If you are "lost," in one way or another, I'm not going to tell you, "you're not alone." Because despite that rational proposition (see supra) that plenty of us are lost all the time, you will still (SEE SUPRA!) feel uniquely ill-equipped to understand what YOUR next step forward is, and all the googling in the world won't help.

So I'll just say this instead. You know what you need to do. Do it one step (one 20-minute timer, one blog entry, one set of dishes, one task, one song) at a time. And do it without being a jerk to yourself. Because odds are, you deserve better.