School-aged me knew everything about herself. She knew what she liked and what she didn’t and how her life would look five years down the line. I knew what I was bad at and good at and I got frustrated at people who didn’t. Just pick something, I used to think. We created our own life, right? We just had to pick a belief, idea, path or behaviour closest to the person we wanted to be and then work towards it.
I didn’t understand how much that ideology stagnated my growth as a person. There is a difference between self-awareness and knowing oneself and I didn’t recognise that distinction till college changed me as a person multiple times, leaving me in a puddle of confusion and an early identity crisis.
Here’s the problem with forming opinions about yourself, you pride yourself on traits that are neither permanent nor without flaws and you associate them with how you recognise yourself. Some of mine were bad at dealing with emotions and fiercely ambitious. I don’t identify with either of those anymore and the transition was made harder by how much comfort I derived from the fact that I knew myself.
Here’s a Mark Manson philosophy that I think holds true for most people, including me: The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
This could be a good thing and a bad thing. If being financially irresponsible is not part of how you identify yourself, you will put a lot of effort into making sure you don’t make financial follies. However, if for some reason, you have been bad with finances for long enough in the past and have resorted to making that a part of who you are, you know just how hard it is to make the change. Hell, everyone around you makes it even harder, teasing you every time you decide to save instead of spend. No one feels comfortable with deviation from the status quo.
When we start associating traits that could have negative sides with ourselves, like being a procrastinator or being bad with money or not knowing how to deal with people, it could be any of these traits that causes us shame or guilt but to make ourselves feel better, we ‘accept’ it as part of our personality. It’s the worst way to twist the concept of self-acceptance and awareness against us.
Good traits are not easy to imbibe, some of us have been doing the bad ones for so long that it’s already hard to break out of those patterns. The damsel in distress attitude that accepting them into our ever-evolving identities creates is something that most of us probably don’t even realise we struggle with. It’s what allows us to hate ourselves for being all of those negative things, not realising that we can’t be identified with anything that isn’t a fact. Being a procrastinator is not a permanent personality trait, it’s a bad habit that small daily struggles can help us eventually get away from.
Something pretty magical happens when you stop hating yourself for ‘being’ something negative. There’s no additional pain to numb so if you wanted to eat healthy and you didn’t, that extra tub of ice cream to numb your hate isn’t necessary anymore. More importantly, you stop finding reasons to punish who you think you are after every failed effort and it becomes simply what it is, a moment that means you need to try again.
Knowing oneself is recognising what you like and what you’re good at and having an idea of what life you want five years from now. Self-awareness is knowing that you’re a human being that is continuously shaped by your personal struggles and experiences and so what you know about yourself right now does not define you in any way, shape or form. Remember the difference and maybe change will become just a tad bit easier, emotionally. I hope one day we all reach a point where our failure to disassociate with a negative trait doesn’t generate hate but pride that we atleast tried.
Until next time,
Charizma
Comments