I Can't Fix Myself.

I’ve spent over 40 years in dogged pursuit of the life of my dreams. It’s SO RATIONAL. It’s what people do, right? We’re supposed to dream of the life we want and then go get it! That’s how to live!

My pursuit of choice was the super-excellent-achiever path to happiness. You know the one: Perfect job, perfect marriage, perfect kids, perfect house, perfect body. All the things.

So my friends and I all took our honors classes and earned our awards and got our diplomas and our degrees and our spouses and our houses and our families and successful careers and we really did one hell of a job checking off all the boxes for a “happy” life. Mom and Dad couldn’t be prouder.

And yet nothing was ever enough. I could never quite shake the desire to be a better, more excellent, more responsible, more enlightened person. I thought that somehow, if I could get rid of all the defective parts of me, I would be truly happy.

Stop being a procrastinator.

Stop being so selfish.

Stop being a complainer.

Stop being afraid.

Stop being a victim.

Stop being a people-pleaser.

Stop being a distracted mom.

Stop being so lazy.

All of these issues needed to be addressed so I could finally get to the peaceful life I craved. And so I worked and worked and worked and worked on myself. I read every book and did all the therapy and the courses and the yoga and the meditations and the workout plan. I even started this blog to work out what the hell was wrong with me.

But nothing ever worked - not for long, anyway. I was always left with my same old self with the same old shitty patterns of behavior. And even though I looked so successful and happy, there was a deep knowing that I was playing a losing game.

What do you do when you completely run out of strategies for fixing yourself?

For me, it meant that I had to face the truth that I would never solve this problem of shitty me. I had to completely GIVE UP the quest for better. The quest, itself, was causing all of my suffering.

Logic would tell you that this would create a life of apathy. How do you get anything done if you aren’t trying to make things (and yourself) better? It’s so striking to me now how 100% logical this question would have seemed to me even just 6 months ago.

But over time, I’ve found that letting go of my need to achieve and get happier has opened up a new possibility: A pursuit of becoming ever-more attuned to the flow of the present moment.

There’s not actually a place you get to in this pursuit, but orienting myself in this way always yields a feeling of “rightness.” Not happiness, necessarily, because sometimes the present moment is really fucking uncomfortable. But this rightness that I feel when I’m right here with what’s happening tells me “Yes!” again and again and again. I see the way everything is becoming so alive and beautiful as I trust the flow of life more and more.

My life is no longer about achievement, or getting better, or even happiness. It’s about learning to flow with what is. I literally don’t care about anything else.

I want to FEEL the sadness that wells up out of nowhere as I sit at my desk.

I want to NOTICE my heart start to race when someone says something that triggers an old story.

I want to LET the silence in a conversation linger without needing to say words to relieve the awkwardness.

I want to ALLOW the joy of connecting with another beautiful human to overtake me and be felt by them.

If I’m paying attention, I always know what to do. The words and actions come without even thinking about them. I don’t have to figure anything out beforehand. And without the pressure to figure anything out (including myself), all that’s left is to be.

It feels like I’ve put down a 100lb bag I’ve been carrying for decades.

I’m so grateful to know this truth. I’m so grateful that my experiences and nervous system are such that I’m able to trust it. I’m so grateful for the beautiful humans who have allowed me to have a glimpse of this truth in them before I was ready to see that it was always in me.

It’s a pretty wonderful thing to find out that I always had everything I needed. Now all that’s left to do is to live.