there is no promise of greatness

originally published on medium

It can clump into physical sickness. At first a disease of the self-concept — soon it becomes something that spreads into the body.

A feeling of nausea. Sweaty palms. Dry throat. Or a nagging in the back of your mind that turns into a tightening of the chest.

What’s this feeling? I’m useless.

Uselessness — sprinkled with a whole lot of shame and self-loathing. Conscious or not, this feeling can mark everything you do.

****

A long time ago, you found out that despite all the motivational bullshit you’ve seen, all the good things you know, they often don’t matter when push comes to shove.

All those years of validation you’ve gotten from someone — your parents? Friend? Significant other? — are watered down. Each ounce of goodness topples as soon as you hit a roadblock.

You feel the disease spread like a virus when you open your computer to finish that assignment you’ve been putting off. You hesitate as you begin typing a word that is supposed to get you closer to an A. But each second of hesitation puts you closer to a B? You don’t want to find out when you’re gambling with your grades what action will lead to which outcome, when your hopes are hung so high now, but your performance matters even more.

You’re stuck in traffic, and this is the fifth time you’re going to be late to see this friend that supposedly means so much to you. It’s because you couldn’t get yourself to finish brushing your teeth on time. “I’m on my way,” you texted as you swiveled your mouthwash so hard, playing out each and every moment that you’d have to try to be happy. You pick up your phone to text that actually, you’re going to be late because you didn’t leave on time, and wince at the inevitable disappointment you’re going to feel, the stupidity that why couldn’t you leave earlier —

Domino effects are tough.

Now you’re on the couch. And you know if you don’t eat lunch now, you won’t have time to for the rest of the day, but why can’t you get up and just make your sandwich already? Thinking about this wastes time. Oh shit. Now you have only 20 minutes to finish the paper when before you had 40, you stupid, stupid piece of sh* —

It does not, not not not not, matter if you know you’re a friendly person. It does not matter if that Instagram you just put up got 500+ likes. It does matter if you’re good looking and just slept with your crush. It does not matter if you are good with a guitar or can do a headstand for 15 seconds in the middle of a dance routine. All of that shit melts away when you’re faced with the dreadful feeling that all you have is right now and you already fucked it up! How are you going to not fuck up the next right now!

It happens to me, a lot, as I have anxiety blocking my ability to create, at the eleventh hour, not because I don’t know what I need to write but because that doing it is an admittance that now it matters more for my career —

So now I freeze.

Now I — you — anyone can — realize you can’t do the thing you must do to set yourself free. Now you are about to fuck up at the exact moment where your spiritual wellness actually hangs in the balance.

When your self-concept is dying and you are the only thing that can save it, and you can’t take action to save it, and now, oh look, your self-concept is you’re a piece of shit because you were late, or lazy, or rude, because you slipped up — how are you going to stop it?

To save your self-concept, you try solutions.

You try dating. Maybe a significant other to share things with will solve things. But flipping through these dating apps — named after inanimate objects to try to seem accessible and cute — just makes you feel less so. Every swipe right makes your heart sing, and then drop, when you realize it wasn’t a match. It’s like a carnival of ridiculousness, the up and downs swelling to the beat of your heart feeling more and more weary.

You try going to therapy. You try to pour out your feelings to a stranger that will write notes on a clipboard and make you feel like a clinical freak. You realize these feelings are mumbled and jumbled, like a rolled up shirt that you can’t iron the wrinkles out of. Can it even still be worn?

Or worse, your therapist listens earnestly to your problems and makes you feel validation you never get any of the other 22 hours of the day. So when you leave the room, it’s as if you’ve put the heater away and unfortunately the outside is still so, so so damn cold —

You try to go on a creative journey. You try to write, play, photograph, draw the thing you’ve been wanting to that will be a referendum on your self-deprecation! No more, you tell yourself, this will be my moment to rise!!

And you’ve been meaning to finish it, finally, just get it done, and you watch the clock tick by and the days on the calendar cross off of you not doing it, and all you think when you remember that fact is how you’re a stupid piece of shit even more now for not getting another thing done —

Your self-concept is in trouble, dude~! What are you doing! You scream and scream every time at your frozen self, your whimpering self. It’s incapable of doing the very thing you need it to do.

You know you want to do it!

You know! Right?

But you must not want to because, at the same time, you’re not doing it. So what does that mean?

Any shrivel of discipline you’ve milked up over the years? Suddenly gone. Suddenly, you’re out of control.

Suddenly you don’t know who you are, and why it’s so easy to do something else instead of the things you want to do, like make yourself cry over Queer Eye season 3. Oh, you actually know why. Those tears are far, far easier to shed over someone else’s life than admitting you see fault in your own. You still cry about that because you can’t cry about something more real, raw, to you, something in which you have a dog in the fight — something like your self-worth.

That all the expectations you have for yourself have stockpiled over and over as you procrastinate on greatness, hoping the procrastination will pave its way to greatness, until you accept that maybe inevitable mediocrity is better anyway than admitting to yourself that by some fault of yours, you’ve sabotaged what it means to be happy —

****

You are extremely shame-driven.

You may be shame-driven in two ways. You either let it become your ego when you realize you care so much what other people think that you don’t even know if the things you’re after are worth it —

You find yourself thirsting after validation in the worst ways possible. You hate yourself for caring each time or not being able to stop.

Or it is your ego. All your actions are an extension of you and a conglomeration of the things you’ve experienced, both good and bad. Any criticism of those is an attack on your own self-concept —

You find yourself becoming extremely unpleasant when feeling attacked. As if the other person ceases to be a human also capable of hurt, because the attack gets so deep, it poisons your wellness.

You feel stuck.

And stuck.

And stuck. And you can’t stop being stuck, and the more you notice you’re stuck, the more you stay stuck.

There is no promise of greatness at the end of each trail. At the end of each subconscious head-banging.

There is only weird, strange, comfort in mediocrity.

****

Here’s the thing we forget — we live in a world inundated with potential. The inverse of that is, we live in a world inundated with pressure.

The little pieces of litter our subconscious collects — every piece of depressing news, every new thing to worry about, every trend to keep up with — when going through life starts to weigh us down. Even doing things we enjoy becomes burdensome.

Suffocation is the greatest reason for procrastination.

The weight of being itself now sucks, as resisting psychic death in the midst of it all becomes our greatest priority.

And besides just trying to not die, trying to live your greatest life is also the biggest chore. Because now everyone is supposed to live it. Now everyone’s soul is a little heavier, as our mode of being should make more of an impact as the world gets more connected… right?

We know more now. So shouldn’t we do more? Aren’t there a million more obligations to try and take care of? As our hearts grow bigger?

Take the physical metaphor: just like in real life, an enlarged heart, known as cardiomegaly, means your muscle is working so hard that the chambers widen.

That heart can’t pump blood as efficiently when it’s too big. It suffocates itself, slowly, without a cure.

So slow the fuck down. Slow slow down. Close yourself off for a day, even a week, if you must.

Take joy in every small beat you can meet. Catch your breath a little more. Sit quietly and meditate on what you do see, do feel, when you can.

Try to feel the literal physical thing beating inside of you, for that’s not what’s beating you up. That’s upstairs. This is downstairs. This is the compassion that may be driving you forward that we all have now. And if you can try to listen to that heart more than that

Useless

Useless

Mind —

And accept that. Maybe I’m not all that. Maybe this won’t be the next Great American novel, or maybe my friend will hate me for 5 seconds if I’m late, or maybe my therapist is my only friend right now.

But maybe within that — maybe you’ll set yourself free from the resistance to being great if you accept you’re not great. And that’s a good starting point.

Maybe then, you’ll finally be able to resist psychic death. Be ok with that there is no promise of greatness. There is at least something constant to put your faith in. Which is that so long as you are alive, you can always create a miracle and start over tomorrow and come back swinging.

There can be more than one feeling that exists. And there’s at least the cheesiest but most relevant one beneath them all — that you’re alive.