When we see ourselves in a photo, we disapprove. “I just can’t take a good picture.” “I don’t… I’m too… I’m not…” — fill in the blank. You get the idea.
When we look in the mirror, we have two options — good or bad. That’s it. There’s no third choice. There’s no C, just a choice between A or a B.
Although we fool ourselves into thinking it was better when we were younger, it was worse. Self-conscious is not self-aware.
We’re either above the mark — that unachievable goal post we set for ourselves — or we’re not. It’s a pass-fail system, heavily weighted to the fail end of the scale.
You know the routine. You’re not skinny enough, young enough, rich enough, successful enough. Just fill in the script to fit your most-visited self-judgment episodes. Your show has been renewed each year. You have plenty of willing sponsors; parents, friends, co-workers, magazine covers.
It doesn’t matter how old you are. You set very clear and specific markers to be “good enough.” You know exactly where the lines are on the court for your yesses and your nos, your ins or your outs; goal or no-goal.
Your ever-ready assessments, explanations, decisions, reasons; those decisions you have made up about yourself, those decisions that sit upon your mind’s daunting judicial bench — always doling out a guilty verdict.
It’s All in the Game
But at some point, you realize it’s just your inner game. You made up all the game’s rules; even worse, you also embody all the players and the officials, as well as the people in the stands.
One option that never seems to be on the table is “self-acceptance.” Self-acceptance is simply not available. What’s on the menu is either better or worse, good or bad, above or below your self-imposed marks.
The option of declaring, “I’m as good as I am going to get, and that’s really good enough,” is nowhere to be found. “This isn’t it. This can’t be it.” It isn’t quite satisfactory that what you got is what you got. You’ll never be what you aren’t. There’s no jubilant self-acceptance, there’s only self-annihilation.
Now you wonder: why you do this to yourself? Why are you your own harshest critic? How come you’ve set up your life to be so awful to yourself? Did you ever marvel at how punitive you can be toward yourself? That righteous voice of self-judgment. The cruelest critic of them all turns out to be you.
But you have begun to realize you’re never going to be good enough, skinny enough, rich enough — whatever enough. You’ve begun to accept yourself and permit yourself to just be you — and that, my friend, is the beginning of wisdom.
You realize you can’t put the soufflé back in the oven. You realize it’s stud poker, not draw poker — that these are the cards you’ve been dealt. You allow yourself to accept that this is it! Do the best you can with what you’ve got. Stop complaining. Start contributing. Stop buying your own bullshit that you just can’t. When this door opens, wisdom starts. It’ the first step on the path to wisdom.
Forging the Way Forward
What I have found on the path toward wisdom are wisdom’s true and admirable values: wisdom gets the truth told, and it clears the nonsense out of the way. Wisdom forges a trail through the debris and the clutter. As you travel down this path, you begin to take ownership of our own life. And once you do that, your journey has truly begun.
— Marc
