Do you ever have times in your life where everything you can’t stand about yourself comes boiling to the surface, like some huge outbreak of emotional acne?
That’s been my life the last few days. For a variety of reasons – some valid, some not – my inner critic has been having a field day. “You don’t have what it takes! You should be more even-keeled. Why can’t you be more consistent? You’re all dream and no achievement. You’re a poser.” And those are just the nice ones, before it really cranks up the volume and goes for blood.
Sit and stew so you can move on through
Thankfully I have mostly come out the other side of all that now. But while swimming in that state, I noticed just how irritated shiny happy self-help ideas made me. With the mood I was in, there just wasn’t any opening for them to find their way in. And trying to shift myself into the positive only made me feel worse, because I was running up against that wall (which fed the idea that there was something “wrong” with me).
Why am I sharing this? Because sometimes living your life to the fullest and maximizing the positive impact you have doesn’t look like the smileyface path. Sometimes it looks like giving yourself permission to be where you are without “fixing” anything, creating the space for you to move through it without additional judgment or criticism.
I’m not suggesting that you should embrace sitting and feeling crappy as a chronic long-term state. But sometimes you simply need to be where you are for a while, without trying to become the shiny happy version of who you think you should be.
Look for the learning
At some point, you’ll start to shift out of that darkness. As you do, you’re in a field fertile with potential insights to help you create a more positive future. Don’t just go skipping off, trying to leave the experience behind. Spend some time learning from it.
Do a post-game review to get a better understanding of what was going on. What changes you might be able to make? What kinds of things lead to those feelings and experiences so you can better avoid them? How might your thinking and assumptions have been skewed or inaccurate? If your inner critic has been at work, were there any nuggets of truth that you could separate from the abusive way they were presented?
Be where you are
What I’m really saying in this post is to give yourself permission to be where you are. But there’s a corollary idea here that’s important, and that’s to let yourself be where you are once the darkness has past.
Resist the urge to keep revisiting it. Resist the temptation to fixate on what went wrong, or how you wish you were different. Once you have squeezed the learning out of it, let it hang out in the past where it belongs, and focus on the here and now.
[image by Ian Wilson]
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LOVE the phrase “post-game review”. You have hit on something so true here, and so seldom talked about. There is a darkness to the smiley faced self-help happy talk. That’s for sure!! We can’t always sustain it. I don’t think we are meant to. Look at all the learning we can pull from those down times. Thank you for the reminder that we need to let it go when we’re done with all that learnin’. Love your work.
K.
Kimberly recently posted..Totem Hunt on the Lake Walk
Thanks Kimberly. As usual when I post something that exposes my not-so-shiny-happy side, I found myself thinking, “Ah helll, why did I just do that?” Thanks for your positive response to it.
And I agree, I don’t think we can, or are meant to, sustain that smiley happy talk all the time. How exhausting! It definitely has its place, and can have a super positive impact on our lives, but it can also imprison us if we let it become a “should.”