The Fucking Paradoxes We Find in Ourselves

I have been dealing with a lot of 'fuck me' lately....that is, my dealings have been fuck me dealings more often than I'd like to admit. Cases in point:

-Instead of communicating about my worries and anxieties, I stew in them, take them on alone, and they fester.

-I wake up in the morning feeling as though I need to be a superwoman, and I feel broken under the weight of all the expectations I have for myself.

Obviously I've developed these strategies for some reason. I've always been independent, at times to a fault. As a reminder of this, my father sometimes likes to recall a time where he took me to get shoes. I don't know how old I was, maybe 10 or 12..maybe a little older. He picked out a damn fine selection of white tennis shoes, but I insisted I wanted grey or black tennis shoes. When he pressed, I apparently told him with no lack of certitude that I could make my own decisions.* Oh, I am glad my parents tolerated my independence even when it might have come across as teenage hostility.

Anyway, take the two problems I describe above and think about what they mean for my life. You'll notice that not only do I like to keep my own problems to myself, I feel responsible for all problems and, often, all people. I feel responsible for everything!

And sometimes this has been good for me or had positive outcomes. Because I feel responsible for others, I'm generally a pretty considerate person. I like to help people. I give really good advice and have a great shoulder to lean on. Because I feel like I have to shoulder all my problems and emotional weight, I tend to be pretty self sufficient. While I need other people, I can be pretty happy on my own.

Those are the positive qualities that result from my behavior, but this same behavior also fucks me up. I sometimes let problems fester or my anxiety balloon out of control when the simple act of communicating my concerns often does a good bit of the work of relieving my anxiety and bringing solutions into focus. I regularly set ridiculous expectations for myself and feel like I have to be tackling everything at once, which leads me to feeling incapable and disempowered...instead of taking one challenge at a time and realizing that I am quite competent--and sometimes pretty awesome--when it comes to tackling those challenges.

Often part of being successful is tackling this sort of paradox in ourselves. The traits/behaviors that give us power and success are many times the same traits/behaviors which bring us down and fuck us up. They are hard to question, even when they are fucking you up, because they have worked for you...they've become instinct, they've become parts of yourself that you take pride in.

My strategy? Just keep fucking trying.



*To this day I don't like white tennis shoes. Currently I own one grey pair in which I mow the lawn, one black pair with fancy gold details, and one regular black pair.