Whenever I hear some platitude or idiom like "there are a million reasons not to do something" I nearly roll my eyes into the back of my head. But there's a little part of me that will still fervently nod like I'm at a Southern Baptist church service. I know those things are used as mantras or thought-terminating cliches, and don't have much substance past making the people who hear it feel good for about five minutes. So why did I watch a whole video from Mark Manson titled "42 Brutal Life Lessons I Wish I Knew in my 20s" where he just rattled off 42 of those phrases in eleven minutes? Shit, I even scoffed and giggled at a good amount of them.
I'm not too far off from him, just five more years and I'll be at that age just hoping I have something to show for it. That, right there. Hoping I have something to show for it was a takeaway from a combination of those life lessons. One was about not having to prove anything to anyone else or yourself. The other was by the time you get to your forties and you've spent all your time bending yourself to fit others' expectations and standards, you're going to be lost. I think I was hitting that point by the time I turned 33, I just didn't know it yet. I felt a sense of yearning, of wanting something else and not knowing exactly what.
I turned to the internet like we all do. Just hoping for some spark to hit me and suddenly I'll know what I want to do for the rest of my life. I needed something else to tell me what would make me happy or make me fulfilled. The only tools I had were to take on the expectations of those around me and mold myself into them. If my parents wanted a kid with good grades and loved playing violin, I would do it. If my friends wanted someone funny and would provide a place for parties, I would do it. Therapy's gotten me this far - and I'm sure I have more to go - and it's taught me to zoom out and look at what my anxieties are really about. The ones crowding my mind today are still from those expectations and coping mechanisms I learned to rely on long ago.
I worry more about how money makes me look rather than finding fulfillment in what I do. I still berate myself when I don't know a subject or feel I've failed when it was something simple which I, or any other person, would easily forgive. When there's something to be done and I don't know how to do it, instead of thinking about the actions it takes I'm tripping over what someone would think when I eventually fail at this new thing I've never done. These all seem so trivial in the grand scheme of things, I mean who cares if you fail? So many people do and it's about getting back up and trying again.
Throughout all the years of reading self-help and digging into every technique nothing really stuck. I feel so self-aware that every time I try it, there's a second voice in my head telling me what I'm doing is just a generically prescribed routine that's made by whoever is telling me about it to sell to the most amount of people. I'm sure there's a diagnosis for this amount of cynicism.