Tuesday, July 4, 2017

How I fell out of love with self help by helping myself.

For so long, I thought if I could just perfect myself, all of my problems would be dissolved. But as it turns out, you need to solve the problems before you can stop caring about perfecting yourself.

Have I really solved all of my problems? Highly unlikely, but I at least made some action towards the biggest problem. I got a divorce. I would not propose this as the solution for everyone, obviously, but if you've been trying to figure out why your primary relationship makes you so unhappy for ten years, it could be an good option for you. Worked wonders for me.

I must thank the self-help industry for much of this. I tried to declutter. I owned my shit. I ran. I dieted. I blogged. I tried photo challenges. I did everything but talk to him about how awful this made me feel. And after all that, he literally bought a cottage and moved there, and we were done, and we were both fine. Conscious uncoupling through real estate.

This is not to say that abandonment felt great. It did not.

But I was finally free from contortion. I could just be me. I had to rediscover what I liked. I tried all the things that were previously forbidden. I stopped going to the events that had always kind of bored me. I listened to bad music and watched whatever TV show or movie I felt like watching. The good news was, I was pretty much already me.

The even better news was that I wasn't damaged by all this craziness, the dumb projects (I still try them sometimes - I may need to revisit the intermittent fasting soon), the twisty poses and affirmations that I am not so sure about. Whew, now we can work on real problems!

Can we fix anything? I was thinking about what this blog would be after the self-help. Can we try these experiments on a larger scale? Maybe ask the United States to drink apple cider vinegar every day until we realize that it's just fucking up our tooth enamel and nothing is happening?

What am I starting to understand is there needs to be a vision. We can't just resist the nasty stuff, but we need a destination in mind. Where do we want to go? Who do we want to be?

So here I go again. Trying to find myself by looking. Answering the rhetorical questions that no one expected to find an answer to, and asking even more. Relaunched.



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