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[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#23: "I Will Achieve Nothing With My Life."
Here's the obverse of #17, because I have swung between the two extremes of that space in my life, powered either by overconfidence in myself and the clear benefits that could be gained by simply listening to me and doing what I say, or the despair that comes from facing the understanding that nobody has any reason at all to listen to me, including the people that really should, and therefore I will be unable to do anything with my life. Based on previous entries in the series, you can likely guess at which points in my life I have had the strongest feelings of despair and uselessness, and you can argue amongst yourselves how much of that really has anything to do with me and what I was doing (or failing to do).
( But there are things I have done, big and small, that might have had an impact on someone else. )
To say that I have achieved nothing with my life is a lie. To say that I haven't achieved everything I want to with my life is closer to the truth, but that, too, bears interrogating to see what kinds of assumptions I have and what kinds of unreasonable goals I think are still achievable. If the ultimate goal of the situation is not to be grasping at things that will not happen and being disappointed that I cannot fulfill them (or did not fulfill them), but to be satisfied with what I have done and to live in the moment, neither yearning for the nostalgia of the past nor striving to the expectations of the future, then, well, there's still a lot of awareness to cultivate. And more things to stop believing in, first by not believing them fully, and then for some of them, to stop believing in them at all.
#23: "I Will Achieve Nothing With My Life."
Here's the obverse of #17, because I have swung between the two extremes of that space in my life, powered either by overconfidence in myself and the clear benefits that could be gained by simply listening to me and doing what I say, or the despair that comes from facing the understanding that nobody has any reason at all to listen to me, including the people that really should, and therefore I will be unable to do anything with my life. Based on previous entries in the series, you can likely guess at which points in my life I have had the strongest feelings of despair and uselessness, and you can argue amongst yourselves how much of that really has anything to do with me and what I was doing (or failing to do).
( But there are things I have done, big and small, that might have had an impact on someone else. )
To say that I have achieved nothing with my life is a lie. To say that I haven't achieved everything I want to with my life is closer to the truth, but that, too, bears interrogating to see what kinds of assumptions I have and what kinds of unreasonable goals I think are still achievable. If the ultimate goal of the situation is not to be grasping at things that will not happen and being disappointed that I cannot fulfill them (or did not fulfill them), but to be satisfied with what I have done and to live in the moment, neither yearning for the nostalgia of the past nor striving to the expectations of the future, then, well, there's still a lot of awareness to cultivate. And more things to stop believing in, first by not believing them fully, and then for some of them, to stop believing in them at all.
