Last time we talked about grounding yourself as your own person.
The example I used was about using hope to build a structure for teaching yourself how to make your own choices (particularly when faced with pressure from others). When people try to subvert your choices for one reason or another—saying that things will be sure to go wrong if you do it the “wrong” way—then you can say, Ah, but I hope otherwise.
Let them think of you as a fool. As long as you can take possession of your choices, thoughts, and emotions—and therefore yourself—they can think whatever they want.
That’s not to say that whatever method you use will necessarily be successful all the time. Sometimes you’ll stop feeling grounded as your own self.
Why?
Not because you’re a failure, but because being your own person is a lot of work, an invisible mental load that requires your biology and schedule to cooperate.
You’re not a failure; you’re tired.
It’s gonna happen.
Let’s extend our case study of hope: so you’ve invested in hope, but you feel hopeless.
We’re all living in a world heavily populated with assholes, people whose egos are black holes that warp the spacetime surrounding them. We’re surrounded by people pleasers, we’re surrounded by weird fucking secret codes and rules that only there to keep the asshole happy, and a fog of narrative about how it’s vital not to disappoint certain people. At all. Ever.
We all get sucked in. It happens.
The moments of joy and clarity we feel fade, and we may be left with confusion and a sense of loss, a feeling that we never really had anything worth fighting for, that nothing we did ever meant anything at all, that any good memories we have of the past were clearly deluded.
You could be taking perfect care of yourself and still face dark days, ordinary days where nothing goes wrong and it still hurts to live and breathe, and some of us will have it worse and more often than others, and it’s not fair. And it will seem like the only sensations we’re capable of registering are painful ones.
We all succumb to despair some days.
It’s hard to catch despair once it starts, because despair takes away your ability to notice anything other than despair, including the ability to observe and understand that what you are feeling is just despair, an emotion, and not the end of the world.
Despair is a vicious cycle, and most of it escape it by tuning it out.
Just noticing that you feel it is kind of a big deal; it’s the difference between noticing that you’re seriously wounded and bleeding out, versus going into shock.
Here’s my advice on where to start rebuilding, if you can catch on to the fact that you’re mired in despair. It may not “work” to get you out of despair as such; there may be a lot of biological stuff that gets in the way. But bear with me.
Tell yourself:
I just want to sit with you.
And then do it.
You don’t have to force yourself to feel better. You might have to force yourself to function. But you don’t have to feel good about yourself. Positive feelings are not required.
You don’t have to say anything nice about yourself.
You don’t have to fix anything you’re ashamed of, big or small.
You don’t have to feel like a person.
You don’t have to heal.
You don’t have to feel like anything will ever change.
You don’t have to like yourself.
It may be overwhelming, and you may not get the sense of perspective implied by “sitting with yourself.” You may instead just be the part of you that hurts and feels broken and alone. That’s okay.
You may not have anything to offer yourself. No wisdom, no perspective. No hope.
You may never feel good about it.
But, as it turns out, we don’t need those things as much as we need someone who just shows up, even when we’re broken and stupid and whiny and feeling worthless and used and not even like a real human being.
When our souls cry out “Why am I even alive?” we’re not really looking for an answer but for someone to sit and say “Dunno? But I got time to listen.”
If you find someone else who needs you and depends on you, well, that can help keep the despair at bay for a while. A lifetime, if you’re lucky and don’t think too hard about who is getting “helped” or the damage you might be doing by “helping.”
But the person who most needs you to show up and provide some company is you.
Maybe that’s all that therapy needs to do: give you practice on how to be better company for yourself.
How to stop screaming at yourself when you’re already hurt.
How to stop defending yourself when nobody’s attacking.
How to feel bad without jumping to a fucking solution when all you really want is to be heard.
A lot of us depend on other people for support, because we can’t see anything worthwhile in ourselves. (Normal people and assholes.)Others look for an internal voice of confidence that drowns out all criticism and self-doubt. But the answer isn’t in your feelings or thoughts; it’s in being present reliably, over time.
You can’t make yourself feel like a person. You can’t make yourself hope. You can’t make yourself not be broken. You can’t make yourself think less self-destructively.
But you can show up.
You can make mistakes, you can make an ass of yourself, you can fail to accept yourself as a person, you can yell at yourself. You can go around in endless circles with no solution. You can be unable to let go of horrible thoughts. You can judge yourself, call yourself names, fight tooth and nail against your own sense of care for yourself.
I don’t know why, but those things don’t seem to matter; it’s just the showing-up part that’s important.
Here are some small, essential steps to “show up for yourself” when you’re in the middle of despair:
- Acknowledge that you feel like shit.
- Complain to yourself about feeling like shit.
- Complain so much it gets boring. Or funny.
- Take breaks when you need them.
- If you notice any patterns, ask yourself about ’em: “So why do we always do that?”
- Then complain about those patterns and the fact that you noticed them.
- When you think you’re done complaining, no you’re not. Keep going.
If you’re constantly complaining about feeling like shit and not noticing how boring and/or funny it is, you may not be complaining enough. Try harder. Complain about the way you never really listen to yourself complaining. Complain about how you’re terrible at complaining. Complain about how the world is unfair and you’re running a damn masterclass on complaining here, people should be paying you to complain!—And another thing, nobody does a really good rant anymore; the state of ranting has never been the same since George Carlin passed.
Or whatever. But, and this is key, you have to show up for the complaining and be ready for more, as much as you can handle and then some. You must become a glutton for your own complaints.
That’s about it.
A lot of us are constantly shutting ourselves down, holding back, censoring ourselves, minimizing our suffering, telling ourselves we don’t feel what we feel and we don’t think what we think, saying that our own concerns are unworthy of us.
You know what? There’s at least one place where each of us deserves to be heard, fully and completely, nay, unconditionally.
And it’s inside our own heads.
When people tell you to love yourself and you can’t, you can’t even imagine how to do it, do this instead: show up for yourself and listen to your own complaints.
Love isn’t a feeling of positive, nay, transcendental positive regard. That’s just emotional chemicals for your brain to be drunk on, and a lot of us are tragically deficient in the realm of internal bliss, whether that be focused on other people or ourselves: not something you can do anything about.
So instead let’s say that love is a choice. It shows up. When you choose to show up for yourself, that’s close enough to self-love.
No feelings required.
It is enough.
Over time, showing up for yourself changes you. You stop being your own enemy, your own harshest critic. When you listen to yourself complain, you are taking the place of the people who should have shown up for you and/or who should be showing up for you now.
Despair isn’t something you need to silence or repress. You cannot give your life a sense of purpose by shaming yourself for being worthless. You do not fix depression by telling yourself to try harder. You do not free yourself from a pattern of abuse by yelling at yourself to try harder or be smarter next time. You do not learn how to be a better friend by silencing everything you say to the people you call your friends.
A friend listens. And they vent, too!
A friend doesn’t explain away what you feel.
A friend doesn’t give you a mountain of advice to try to get you shut up.
A friend may talk you out of doing something stupid (after listening to the pros and cons), but they don’t call you stupid for wanting to do it.
A friend might get overwhelmed, or busy, or distracted. But they also do their best to drop everything that isn’t vital to show up for you when you need it. Even if they’re mad at you. Especially if they’re mad at you.
—Maybe you don’t have friends like that. Maybe you do. Maybe if you learn to stop shutting down your own suffering, you’ll be more present for other people, and you’ll have more of them.
Including you.
…
You can find the Asshole Mitigation Plan series outline here.
