Trust

trust yourself a little more by Andrew J Cosgriff

Trusting myself to care for myself, to grow and transform without force, control, oppression, and shame as the motivators, is so hard. Without negative motivators, will I continue to change in positive ways? Will it happen, but much more slowly? I fear that perhaps I will revert to an older, weaker, sicker, less “evolved” version of myself. As I change my methods and strategies of self-healing towards compassionate, patient, loving care, all of the repressed self-hatred bubbles up. The voices (in their high-pitched Australian accents and adorable onesies) are screaming at me to toughen up, straighten out, and force myself to be “good” through willpower and control. These are the strategies I used as a perfectionist over-achiever, characteristics I’ve been shedding for several years now. The vestiges of these traits still roam my subconscious, looking for ways to scare me into compliance, to trigger the survival-mode, panicked desperation that will cause me to revert to striving, to forcing, to pushing, to contorting myself into new and “better” shapes. I am slowly learning to trust myself instead. For instance, over my two-week winter break I made no plans to do any work and no lists of all the work I could be doing. This did not extend to my personal life, however, where I had several major projects listed as goals, including digitizing my entire filing system of the past ten years and revamping my financial tracking systems. Not that I did either of these, but the fact that I was hoping to do so is indicative of my general approach to “free” time. So yeah, I’m taking baby steps here, but the lack of work related goals on the list was a major change, and turned out really well. I spent the last two days of break camped out in the living room reading, journaling, and… doing some work related things. I was internally motivated to do them because I was feeling a bit restless, had a good solid break, and wanted to start thinking about teaching my upcoming classes. I really like my job and enjoy most of the things I have to do for it. When I was able to trust myself to choose when and how to do work, I felt naturally motivated to do so. I learned that I can trust myself to be consistent with my job, without forcing myself to do work through willpower. This month I am experimenting with extending that method into the school week, not deciding ahead of time when I will plan my lessons and do various work related paperwork, but just letting the week flow. So far this method is working out just fine. I am definitely going more slowly than I typically do, but still getting everything done on time. I am much more relaxed overall, and discovering for myself what pace of life I am most inclined toward. 

Accepting this new pace is incredibly challenging for me. This blog, for instance, is one example of this shift. I initially wrote a blog post every single day for three months straight. Then I was attempting to write once a week. Then my life got super busy with moving to a new city, starting a new job, etc. When I started writing again, I decided not to have a structure to how frequently I would write. At first it was several times a week and that felt good. I felt that being consistent was an accomplishment, and I felt proud of myself. Conversely, the fact that I haven’t written a post in weeks felt shameful, like a failure. I almost wrote a post after New Years. I even have a half-finished post about New Year’s Resolutions that I never felt like finishing.

Allowing and accepting that I might not feel motivated to write for an unpredictable length of time is a form of trusting myself – trusting that I will know what is best for me, trusting that I am still an okay person even if I don’t blog consistently, trusting that my life will not fall apart if I’m not constantly “in control”. This is a long slow process, but so worth it! When I am able to release my grip on myself I can approach each moment, each activity, each task with ease and relaxed engagement. I don’t have to bribe myself with caffeine or sugar in order to force myself to do something unpleasant. I hope I can continue to inch in this direction. There is a long road to travel from constant controlling behavior and outlook to fully trusting my intuitive sense of timing and priorities. The road itself is quite scenic, though, so maybe it doesn’t even matter how long it takes or where I end up. These ideas are truly radical for me. Maybe they are for you too?