“You’re too hard on yourself,” my Dad told me last week.
Hard on myself? Being hard on yourself is being a perfectionist. Telling yourself you’re not good enough. Thinking that you aren’t attractive.
I’m hard on myself because I do too much, and can’t keep myself from doing any less. I’m hard on myself for being cocky. I’m hard on myself for putting on a bathing suit and thinking, “Damn, my boobs are bangin’.”
That thought is true.
It all began with a breakdown on the bathroom floor. I was at a “Art of the Job Search” event for my internship program last summer, and I was so sick of hearing the same things I’ve always heard once again: “It’s all about networking, you have to sacrifice to get ahead, you’re only going to make $25,000 your first year in journalism,” blah blah blah.
If it’s true that I’ve spent the past three years being hard on myself, then why do I have to sit here and listen to you be hard on my industry, when it’s already hard on me to begin with?
With tears streaming down my face on that cold linoleum floor, I was comforted by friends who told me I could do whatever I wanted. That it was OK to seek change; that I didn’t have to keep pushing for the goals I originally had.
And in the past year, I’ve done just that-I’ve gone running after anything that sparked my interest. I wanted to change. I wanted to be new.
From thoughts on grad school to conducting research on feminist theory in the media, unsuccessfully applying for the Rhodes scholarship and even considering taking a break from the media industry and doing Teach-for-America; I explored it all.
And in these pursuits of never-before-sought interests, I felt temporarily fulfilled. I thought that by meeting new people and doing new things, that I was living my life the way I wanted to live it. But I wasn’t at all. Rather, I was living my life ruled by what I felt others expected of me.
And the reality is, no one expected anything of me at all. We are our worst enemy.
The only person who is ever hard on you is yourself. I can say that an industry is rough on me, or that my parents and peer pressure do, too. But the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, and the only person I have to fear is myself.
I don’t want to fear myself anymore. Seeking change is fear. It’s fear that who I am now, won’t be the most succesful person, the most loved person, the most beautiful girl.
But it is in embracing ourselves, and refusing to influence ourselves toward muddled, imaginative clarity as I once sought, that is how we stop being hard on ourselves. It’s not in exploration that we find comfort. It’s in knowing what we want and finding excitement in being content.
It is the effort in wanting to change that is indicative of just how much we don’t want to change in the first place. I didn’t want to do research for feminist theory, or go abroad, or teach inner city youth.
When you try, it’s not from the heart. I had stopped just doing. Just being myself didn’t seem like I was working enough.
Now I know that who we are now is who we will become- no “trying” involved. Who we are is not everything, and who we are never really changes more than a few degrees. I spun a 180 out of control.
No more circles- it’s linear growth which changes us naturally, comfortably and makes us most happy.
*Posted by Sammy D
