No matter how hard I’ve tried recently, I can’t seem to get myself to go out or make new friends or get a job or work out consistently.
I’m avoiding actually admitting to myself that I’m starting over.
I feel stuck in a freeze response.
I know I’m making my life more difficult than it needs to be, but I can’t seem to snap out of it.
I’m jobless, living with my parents, barely leaving the house, watching way too much TV, and I’m struggling to just get out of bed.
I’m so embarrassed of my life and who I am right now.
I know I shouldn’t care what others think, and I should just work on shifting my perspective to be more grateful for everything I have, but it’s a lot easier said than done.
I was raised in a church that hyper-focused on the dichotomy of good and bad, as most churches do.
There were so many hierarchies, the righteous and the sinful, the saved and the lost, the pure and the defiled.
I was taught to over-analyze myself and others in just about every aspect, and it instilled in me this need for purity, for perfection.
As a result, unsurprisingly, I became a very judgmental person.
I judged others, but no one more harshly than I judged myself.
I’ve always seen my life through a lens of shame.
Terrified of being misunderstood by other people, scared they won’t see my intentions, or understand where I’m coming from, that they might think I am a bad person, or a stupid person, or a useless person.
I’ve never felt like I was good enough.
I start all these projects and have all of these great ideas, but I always end up psyching myself out of following through with them.
Instead of just striving for growth, I continue to find myself stuck in a cycle of inaction.
Overwhelmed by unrealistic standards.
I didn’t really make any real progress with overcoming all of the limiting beliefs I had about myself until I discovered Taoist philosophy.
One story, in particular, has always resonated with me, and whenever I find myself feeling stuck in a negative spiral, I remind myself of this story-
Basically, one day a farmer’s horse runs away, and his neighbors all come around and say different versions of “wow this is so unfortunate for you, what bad luck!”
And the farmer simply responds to them saying, “Good thing, bad thing, who knows?”
Days later, the horse returns with other wild horses, and the neighbors all gather around again, this time to celebrate his good fortune.
Again, the farmer says, “Good thing, bad thing, who knows?”
Soon after, the farmer’s son breaks his leg trying to tame one of the wild horses.
The neighbors again say, “oh no, it must have been bad luck after all!”
But the farmer calmly repeats, “Good thing, bad thing, who knows?”
Shortly after the incident, the army comes around to draft all able-bodied young men for the war, but the son is spared and doesn’t have to go to fight in the war because of his injury.
Again, neighbors try and say that this must have been a blessing in disguise and that it turns out it was actually a good thing that his son broke his leg!
And I’m sure you can guess what the farmer responds- “Good thing, bad thing, who knows?”
Now I always knew life was unpredictable, and I had heard all about blessings in disguise growing up, but this story really helped me understand how much I assign the words good and bad to everything in my life, and how pointless it is to go around labeling people, events, and anything really as inherently good or bad.
It was a simple but necessary reminder for me that life is just a series of interconnected events.
It helps me be kinder to myself when things don’t go perfectly accordingly to plan, or I make a mistake, or embarrass myself in some way, as I often do.
Perfection is an illusion; it simply doesn’t exist.
I know this, but I still very much struggle with it, as I am right now.
And I want to quickly emphasize that learning something that helps you change your perspective doesn’t heal you.
No amount of knowledge is going to absolve you from feeling things that are deeply entrenched in your psyche.
You have to put in the reps, and stack the proof, and that takes time.
You have to face and feel those feelings of being not enough, and feel stuck in that, and then eventually come out of it.
And over time, at least in my experience, the feelings are shorter-lived, and I make sense of them and pull myself out of the perfectionist hole a bit faster.
But healing is not linear, it’s a process of ups and downs and no motivational video or inspiring quote or ted talk is going to change you.
I remember thinking that I was healed from all my issues because of everything I had learned in quarantine, and I really genuinely believed that, but I was single, and didn’t have to deal with coworkers or anything really.
And as soon as I got back into a relationship, and into the workplace, and into the real world, I experienced all of the triggers, and I realized that I had so much more work to do.
Rewiring your subconscious programming is a lot harder than consciously changing your beliefs about yourself.
I’m sure everyone is familiar with the black and white yin and yang symbol, but a lot of people don’t know where exactly it comes from or what it really means.
Yin and yang is a Taoist philosophy, and a really powerful framework for understanding balance.
Growing up in a culture that celebrates the binary—good versus evil, success versus failure—I was conditioned to believe that drowning out the negative with the positive was the ultimate goal.
Good must triumph over evil.
The hero must defeat the bad guy.
We must be more positive and less negative or more productive and less lazy or more useful or efficient or whatever and it’s fucking exhausting…
But the concept of yin and yang offered me a different perspective, and it really saved my life in a lot of ways.
Yin and yang don’t represent opposition or conflict, but rather they are complementary forces in balance.
They’re like two sides of the same coin; there’s a necessary polarity that exists like the northern and southern poles or positive and negative charges.
One does not exist without the other- they can’t.
They’re simply different and opposite aspects of the same system.
The more I learned about this symbol that I had seen around my whole life, the more freed I felt from my past perceptions of the world and everything in it.
Instead of striving for this unattainable ideal of perfection, like the best version of myself without any flaws, yin and yang taught me to embrace the wholeness of myself and my experience—the light and the dark, the highs and the lows, the good and the bad.
Instead of battling against the dark, negative, or imperfect aspects of ourselves, Taoism encourages us to understand them and flow with them.
The yin yang view of the world is, as Alan Watts likes to call it, serenely cyclical.
Like the story of the farmer.
It’s not 1 + 2 = 3, it’s 1 leads to 2 leads to 3 leads to 4 and so on, there is no equals anything, no good or bad end result, there just is and then there is infinitely more.
Fortune and misfortune, life and death, and everything in between continues to come and go and ebb and flow everlastingly without beginning or ending.
Christians in particular and western culture in general can have a hard time with this concept because it seemingly goes against the idea of having any possibility of progress, which flows from their linear perspective of time and history rather than cyclical.
There is nothing in Chinese Taoist philosophy like the original sin in Judaism or a final end place like heaven and hell.
You can’t just reach success or your best self one day.
Working out 4 times a week + reading self-improvement + daily meditation does not = Happy Grace.
Life is not some perfect equation.
I had to learn and accept that I am a part of an organic and interconnected universe where imperfection is not a flaw but simply a fundamental aspect of existence.
We don’t judge clouds for not being perfectly fluffy and picturesque, or waves for not being wavy enough, or rocks for being too big or too small or too lumpy.
The imperfections in nature are normalized and accepted and even considered beautiful- so why do we not view ourselves as a part of nature and offer ourselves the same level of understanding?
I think we forget sometimes that we are a part of nature.
That you and I are a part of a much larger system, like the number six in a stream of numbers, it means nothing without the other numbers.
And by learning to trust in this interconnectedness, I’ve found a sense of freedom and peace and belonging that perfectionism never allowed.
I’ve learned that the unpredictability of my life and my future is not something to fear but to embrace.
It allows me to be more present, and to learn, and grow in ways that perfectionism never could.
I’m learning to accept that my worth is not measured by how flawlessly I execute my plans or by how perfect my life seems to others, but rather by how authentically I live my life through all of the so called good or bad chapters.
I will fail and make mistakes.
And some days will be dark days and I’ll say shit I don’t mean and sometimes I’ll be immoral or not know something or be messy or lazy or weak or whatever and all of that is okay.
And it’s not just okay, it’s not good or bad, it’s simply a necessary part of the human experience.
There’s so much out there that pushes us to compare ourselves and our lives to others, so I’m always having to remind myself that life is not about being my best self, but about learning to live harmoniously with my negative side, my darkness, my yin, in all of its complexities and chaos.
The journey is ongoing, and I’m still learning how to be kind to myself, but every day I find myself taking one more step towards loving myself just as I am, and slowly but surely, becoming more and more unapologetically human.
Thank you for being here,
— Grace
