Sanity. More or less.
That’s the quick answer, at any rate. What am I waiting for when it comes to starting my life and getting things moving?
I am waiting for a break in my insanity. Hopefully a permanent one.
Well then what will that involve?
I have given that a lot of thought lately, and it all comes down to doing it anyway.
As in, be scared and do it anyway. Feel the fear and acknowledge it and validate it but stop letting it keep me all cooped up inside.
That does involve something I have mentioned a couple of times before : becoming a harder man. Less squishy like a marshmallow on the inside. More capable of pushing myself to do what I want to do. Less emotionally flabby.
It is something I have dodged my entire life without really knowing why. There were a lot of times when toughening up would have made life way, way easier. Being such a cream puff has brought me nothing but suffering, as far as I can tell.
So why not become a harder man?
I think it has always felt like it would cost me something I did not want to lose. Something precious and delicate and golden. Something special.
What that is, I am not sure. My innocence, I suppose. Becoming a harder man would mean facing hard truths that, once confronted, would change me in a way that cannot be reversed or altered, and that frightens me.
Do it anyway. I know, I know.
Besides, the fact that the cost is high does not preclude it being worth it. That is often the case with personal growth. You don’t know how much happier you will be as a butterfly than you ever were as a caterpillar until you make the transition.
I guess that one way or another, you need to do the next thing simply because it’s the next thing without knowing what will happen as a result.
That’s why all those people who are way dumber than me have real, successful, NORMALlives when my genius self languishes in the gutter unable to even start to get ,myself going in a happy direction.
Or any direction, really.
Because unlike me, they unquestioningly followed their emotions and instincts and therefore developed into normal, healthy adult members of the species.
Without ever having to know “why” first.
And that included toughening up when it was called for. They did not spend their entire adult lives too scared of life to do anything with themselves.
Then again, they had supportive parents who cared enough about them to both have expectations of them and tell them what they were.
I keep telling myself I “should” have gotten over being taken out of university and forced to move back to Summerside almost 30 years ago.
But some injuries just don’t heal on their own.
Even worse, some injuries actively keep you from seeking treatment for them by leaving you too scared of the world to even ask for help.
And there is only one way out of that cul de sac :
Doing it anyway.
Even if it hurts.
More after the break.
More on doing it anyway
It really does come down to pain in the end.
Forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to do because it scares you hurts, especially when you are not used to doing it because you have lived your life via the Way of the Wimp which has as a bedrock rule that “if something hurts or is scary, then you can’t do it and don’t or shouldn’t have to do it. ”
That means that the second something is painful or scary (or difficult or harsh or whatever), you give up. The idea of sticking it out is foreign to you and you might very well have convinced yourself that said things are “impossible”.
But are they?
What if the reward for doing it was a million bucks and the punishment for not doing it was a slow death by torture? Would you still consider it “impossible” to do the painful scary thing? Would you be willing to die a horrible death just to prove that yes, it was impossible the whole time. DAD?
Or might you find yourself suddenly seeing the thing as a lot more “possible”? Might you, in fact, find it remarkably easy to do now, and find yourself wondering what all the fuss was about as you helicopter to your private island?
Then it was never really “impossible”, was it? It was actually very, very possible. You just thought you didn’t really have to do it because nobody could tell whether it was possible for your or not and so you acted like a brat and said, “Well I can’t. So there!”
I mean, you know, deep down, that when you said it was “impossible”, what you were really saying was that it wasn’t worth it to you. You looked at the potential rewards (unknown and uncertain) versus the cost (definitely doing something you don’t want to do) and decided it simply was not worth it to you.
And that’s a far cry from “impossible” isn’t it?
But that is the Way of the Wimp for you. It’s a way paved with lies and excuses and a determined pattern of refusing to do anything that might lead to growing up.
Fear rules and courage is the enemy. Yours is the path of the infinite retreat. It starts with avoiding one thing but that soon leads to two thing, then three, then before you know it you are locked in place, unable to move in any direction because no matter which way you go, it leads you closer to something you’re avoiding.
And then there you are, trapped, paralyzed, frozen. Buried alive under a mound lof lies, excuses, evasions, half-truths, and self-manipulation.
And you like to tell yourself there is no way out.
But you know damned well there’s a way out.
You do it anyway.
And if you don’t, know that you are choosing your own sorry fate.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.