Since writing my first post on here, I’ve started and not finished several new posts. I’ve gotten inspired to write but after some time my inner critic will pick up his megaphone and start cutting deep.
What makes you qualified to write about this? Sure you can regurgitate information for a college essay, but you can’t come up with original works. You’ll be the biggest hypocrite when you eventually fail and don’t live up to your words. This idea sucks, you should delete it and start over. No one cares what you have to say. You’re not good enough.
These same thoughts made me spend days rereading and reworking my first post until I felt that it was perfect. While the content of these harsh thoughts are unique to writing this blog, the theme is nothing new. They are just the latest manifestations of my deepest and oldest insecurity of not being good enough.
Now I don’t blame my parents for this insecurity, they were doing the best they could with the expectations of parenting in our culture. But at some point along the way, I (as well as most people, I imagine) internalized a message that there are things about me in my natural state that are unacceptable. This resulted in feelings of unworthiness/inadequacy and the belief that I have to do good in order to be good enough.
I developed a general negative feeling toward myself that I tried to disprove through my experiences, interactions, achievements, etc. An example given by Ram Dass demonstrates my experience perfectly: You try hard, you get an A, and you feel good. But if you don’t quite get the A, it’s not like you feel nothing… you feel bad. The baseline has become negative, not zero. If I existed in any state outside of the ideal (the A) I felt bad about myself. I felt unacceptable, unworthy, unlovable, not good enough. My mind was devoid of self-compassionate thoughts and only felt satisfied when meeting an ideal.
A form of perfectionism emerged as a defense mechanism. I only want to put myself out there if I can “get the A.” If I can’t for whatever reason, I self-sabotage and don’t even try to avoid the feelings of not being good enough. For me, this shows up as not wanting to go to the gym until I feel like I’m in good enough shape to be seen in the gym, getting the urge to drop a class if I don’t think I’m going to make an A, not wanting to date if I don’t feel like I’m currently the perfect version of myself, or wanting to scrap a post if it doesn’t feel perfect. If I don’t feel like my worth will be directly or indirectly validated by others, I don’t even want to put myself out there.
I still struggle with this insecurity but I’ve gotten glimpses of freedom through therapy and spiritual practices. Undoing a lifetime of programming is a slow process, but today I’m on the path of acceptance. The teachings of Ram Dass have been invaluable to my growth in this area.
I always thought the way out of disliking myself was learning to love myself. Unfortunately, I’ve found that as long as I’m operating in the pendulum of polarities, things will always swing back towards feeling not good enough. So the answer seems to be to move beyond the polarities of love and hate to first reach a place of merely acknowledging myself. I must look at my own good, bad, and ugly without judging, just acknowledging. Removing judgment helps me see how poignant this insecurity is and invokes feelings of self-compassion.
Once I’m able to accept and see my own truth with some compassion, the next step is to share it. As long as I’m stuck in negative judgment towards myself, I can only assume others will judge me in a similar light; so vulnerability is terrifying. This fear of vulnerability only reinforces feelings of inadequacy. But a pinch of self-compassion makes it seem possible that someone else may see my truth without judgment and opens the door for vulnerability. I got my first ever glimpse of this in therapy and can distinctly remember the sense of freedom I felt after sharing my truth with someone and not receiving judgment in return. It began to erode years of reinforcement of the belief that I’m not good enough.
Today, I strive to acknowledge and appreciate myself as I am in the present moment. I often fall short of this on my own so I have supports in my life that help me reach acceptance through vulnerability. I see my therapist on a regular basis, I’ve developed some close bonds with people who help me see myself in a compassionate light (shout out M.H. and J.B.), and I share parts of myself through these posts.
A+