– Annalisa Coliva
There’s only one person that was there in the womb with you, one person who will be lying next to you on your death bed, one person who will be there for each and every moment in between. It’s you baby, so you’d do well to snuggle up and make friends because it’s gonna be a long ride. And if you try to make friends, only to find you’re not great company, change yourself until you are. Change yourself until you’re someone you’d actually like to hang out with. Better yet, someone you’re proud of, someone you can laugh at or with, someone you can forgive, someone you can trust, someone you can love.
Good advice right? Of course. We know it inherently, and yet so many of us don’t follow it, choosing instead to look for happiness and fulfillment outside of ourselves, often in other people. So the obvious question is why? Why look for fulfillment in others and not in ourselves? I’ll offer up an informed guess from a man who’s made this mistake and has thought on these matters much. The answer is simple, we don’t want to hang out with ourselves or laugh or trust or love ourselves, because we don’t really even like ourselves. We are a known quantity. We’ve lived with ourselves and we’ve let ourselves down, we’ve become far too familiar with all the ways we don’t stack up to some ideal version of ourselves we’ve created in our minds. Over time we’ve come to convince ourselves that we simply aren’t up to snuff. This isn’t self-loathing and I’m not saying that there aren’t aspects of ourselves we like, but on the whole, we believe that we’ve failed ourselves. So we seek outside of ourselves to find happiness, particularly in our love relationships, after all, another person is an unknown quantity, surely they must have figured out all the things we haven’t. Certainly they don’t come prepackaged with all that disappointment. They’re fresh and new and everything is great…until it isn’t. Until we realize that they’re just as lost and disappointed with themselves as we are with ourselves. Or, as is too often the case, they’re actually worse than us. Perhaps they’ve even taken advantage of us since they’ve seen that we’re desperate and unsure of ourselves. So then you find yourself not only dealing with your problems but the problems of another person as well.
This isn’t just limited to romantic relationships. We take the advice and or opinions of others and either try to change ourselves to meet someone else’s opinions about what we should be doing or how we should act or we allow their opinions of us to hurt us or worse, we internalize them until they become part of our larger narrative about ourselves and all the things we aren’t doing right. And these people don’t necessarily have to be “bad” people. They can be our friends and family members, people with good intentions but whose opinions, if taken to heart, can still end up being dangerous to us. It’s often not a nefarious act, quite the opposite. Most people will try to give you good advice, the trouble is that they simply aren’t you and therefore they may be considering a hundred different things that don’t align with what you actually want. Instead, they’re telling you what they want for you, based on their own, sordid life story.
I’m not saying that everyone is going to give you bad advice, for instance, I believe I’m currently giving solid advice to you, dear reader. So how do you tell the difference between good and bad advice or who’s really the right friend or lover for you? To be honest, that’s a really difficult question to answer. And at the end of the day, you may get things wrong even if you do everything right, but sooner or later you will get it right if you do this, get to know yourself. Really get to know yourself. You may be thinking, “but I already know myself! After all, haven’t I been living with myself all this time?” Sure, but how much of that time did you spend thinking about your values, maybe even making a list of them? Or what about the values you’d want in a partner or friend? How about a list of your goals for the next year, five years, or decade? Have you come to terms with any possible traumas from your past? Maybe seeing a therapist or at least researching the topic? Have you learned how to be brutally honest with yourself, taking full responsibility for all your faults and mistakes? Have you developed a real, unshakable confidence in yourself? How are you doing with the whole inner peace thing? I bet most of you can’t answer yes to most of these questions and if you can, my hat is off to you because if you do it right, it’s some time-consuming and often painful work. Time-consuming and painful and totally worth it. That’s not to say I’m some holier than thou sage or anything, far from it, but I have been working on myself for some time now and so I speak from a place of personal knowledge and experience. Working on these things and finally starting to make progress on them is like slowly breathing out long-held stale air and then taking a deep breath of fresh and sweet oxygen. Difficult people and troubling situations suddenly seem manageable. The difficult moments still come but you see them for what they are, difficult moments, moments that pass. Things begin to make sense. There is the sense that everything happens for a reason and that it’s slowly leading you to the right path, the path you were always meant to be on.
I want you to get real quiet for a minute, really still. There now, can you hear it? Faint and far off in the distance, someone is calling to you. It’s your future self, the one who took every right next step, the steps that are sometimes hard to take but the ones you already know you should take. It’s calling to you and saying, “God, you should see the view from here. It’s so beautiful. Please, please do the right thing so that one day soon, you too can see what I see.”
Get to know yourself. Do the work. Earn your own respect every day. If none of this speaks to you, that’s fine. Thanks for reading. But if it does, if it’s in your heart, then do it. It isn’t easy, but it is possible and so worth it.
