I'm Tired Of Working On Myself Constantly
You don't have to. Your healing is not supposed to be another impossible task. The Advice Column.
I’m tired and overwhelmed by working on myself all the time. I understand that healing isn’t linear, but sometimes I feel like I’m pressured to be happy with my progress and to keep going. Despite all the processed trauma and repressed emotions, I want to know that I’m still allowed to feel bad sometimes.
When “The Work” starts to feel like you’re invalidating your own emotional experience in order to perform like you’re growing and evolving, it’s no longer serving its purpose. You’re in service of the inner critic which demands you mask yourself in order to be received rather than honoring your capacity. As a human in healing, you deserve to observe yourself with curiosity, tenderness, and wonder; not greater judgment and criticism. With love, stop making your healing another impossible standard to meet. You’re not a project; you’re a person.
When you treat yourself like a task, you’re bound to reach burnout. This is entirely normal. If you work at your growth like there’s a destination to meet, you’ll find yourself spinning your wheels and gagging at the scent of burning rubber. It serves as a reminder that you are not a machine, but infinite energy in motion and flux. You are supposed to have periods of contraction and expansion. Of growth and decay.
Not to contradict the brilliance of Maya Angelou, but just because you know better, does not mean you do better immediately, consistently, and flawlessly. In healing, we acquire new information which shows us a better way. We take that information and create a buffer of support as we shed habits, coping mechanisms, and protective instincts which got us this far and no longer serve us. But now, we’re operating in the body, soul, mind, and character of a brand new bitch who we’re still becoming acquainted with. Some of us may still be learning that they answer to a new name, that they dance to a different tune. The only way you’ll find out is if you stop working to build someone who already exists, who doesn’t need to be fixed, and whose ready for a little space in your life as they are.
“The Work,” in my opinion, operates like learning a new language. A student of language is most successful in an integrated and immersive experience, not when you’re in a classroom slaving over worksheets. All of the newness you step into while deep in shadow work, you have to go out there and live by having fun, making new connections, responding differently to old narratives, and fully engaging in a new way of being. Listen to your instinct when it’s time to pull back and trust that the toolbox you’ve stocked in a season of heavy inner work will be helpful and illuminating in a season of frivolity.
As someone who still begs my therapist for a gold star after every session, I know what it’s like to have Good Student Syndrome. To be afraid that if you’re not always feeling A+, then you’re failing at doing The Thing correctly. Who you are, however, is so much bigger than a grade. A grade is a disrespect to your expansiveness.
You don’t need whatever mystified version of healing you think exists. When I first started my healing journey - meaning I approached my world with intention in a way I never had prior - it coincided with a spiritual awakening. Turns out shadow work in cognitive behavioral therapy and shadow work in literal witchcraft is the same thing. Anyway, I bought the crystals, I bought the herbs, I read the books, I learned the spells, and ultimately found out absolutely none of that shit was the magic. I’m the magic. I’m the healing. The bells and whistles - overdoing it with excessive dedication to what healing looks like versus embodying the magic of it by letting yourself just exist - are creating expectations that can almost never be met and evading the beauty of the process.
Sometimes, we delude ourselves into thinking a constant cheery disposition, a propensity to move on quickly from heartbreak, frustration, depression, and a general funk is “high vibrational,” but it can become bypassing at best. Feeling bad for whatever reason is not the antithesis of working on yourself. Having fun and lifting the proverbial weight off of your shoulders to be the bigger person, to be of sound judgment, to act in a “higher self” all the time is not the antithesis either. In fact, it’s part of the process. It feels like a losing battle to perform as someone above the human experience of feeling really shitty and acting as flawed humans do.
The Work is holding hands with yourself through every stage, asking for support when you need it, and giving yourself a break from self-improvement in favor of self-acceptance and personal freedom. The inner critic and much of what we’re fed by society demands we reject our murky, shadowy, spiky, and fluid bits for something that other people can count on like a Walmart front door greeter. That’s no longer your job, my love. Hang up your bullshit vest.
You’re not running a race to meet your “best self,” you’re unraveling the truth about who you’ve always been. Take all the time you want and a much needed break when you need.
PS. This is what we’re not gonna do to ourselves.
Thank you for this. I needed it so much.
That Good Student Syndrome gets me every time! (Doesn't help that I'm in a PhD program.) Thank you for these encouraging and true words. :)