This doesn’t cut it.

by Posted on

I have a pic­ture of myself here, it’s an ID pho­to for gain­ing entry to one of San Fran­cis­co’s jails from the days when I used to do out­reach in the jails. Damned if that picture—a pho­to tak­en by the Sher­if­f’s Department—doesn’t look real good. It’s not nor­mal for a pho­to ID tak­en by a munic­i­pal employ­ee to look good.

But here’s the thing: I was tak­ing care of myself and not in the half-mea­sures way that seems to be avail­ing me noth­ing. I was get­ting to the gym four times a week and care­ful about what I ate. Now I pret­ty much make it there twice, just to use the lock­ers and show­er when I run, and nev­er actu­al­ly do any­thing inside the gym. And I have thir­ty pounds and three notch­es on my belt to show for it. And a lot less strength.

I’ve fall­en back to a lev­el of exer­cise appro­pri­ate for car­diac patients and the mor­bid­ly obese. I’m prob­a­bly get­ting all of the sys­temic health ben­e­fits of exer­cise, and that’s a good thing, but I’m not actu­al­ly improv­ing, and I’ve fall­en way back.

This is just a learn­ing expe­ri­ence, I guess. Self-improve­ment is hard. Lis­ten to that in your mind’s ear in Talk­ing Bar­bi­e’s voice, but self-improve­ment rather than math.

The thing is, I don’t know any way oth­er than self-improve­ment to stop hat­ing myself. If I’m not good enough now, I have only two choic­es: accep­tance or action. I need to bet­ter myself or else some­how devel­op the denial mech­a­nisms for self-accep­tance. I don’t seem to have those mech­a­nisms. I’m vague­ly haunt­ed by the idea that improve­ment won’t be enough, but I’m into the idea that progress helps even when we fall short of our ideals.

Black­out—Muse

Published by splicer

4 Replies to “This doesn’t cut it.”

  2. Seems like it can come from
    Seems like it can come from A) chang­ing what I don’t like about myself or B) pre­tend­ing those things don’t both­er me.

  3. How about © chang­ing your
    How about © chang­ing your men­tal habit of disliking?

    That does­n’t mean you have to give up hav­ing goals for self-improve­ment, it just means ceas­ing to regard your­self with an atti­tude of rejec­tion. I mean, that’s what accep­tance is, right — the oppo­site of rejection?

    Actu­al­ly, no: accep­tance is the oppo­site of denial.

    It’s true that in some sense, one has to earn one’s own self-respect. You won’t think of your­self as a good per­son if you go around lying or hurt­ing peo­ple or run­ning away from any­thing that makes you ner­vous. But on the more basic lev­el, your first choice is between whether you take a judge­men­tal and fault-find­ing atti­tude toward your­self, or whether you let your­self be as you are and work with what you’ve got, rather than with what you wish you had.

    At bot­tom, it isn’t about believ­ing or dis­be­liev­ing that you meet some ran­dom stan­dard of ade­qua­cy — it starts with just “What is, is.” Self-rejec­tion often comes out of a sort of mag­i­cal belief that your­self, and per­haps the whole world along with you, should have turned out some entire­ly dif­fer­ent way from how they actu­al­ly are. If you expect the world to work dif­fer­ent­ly from how it is work­ing, then you won’t be patient with you being the way you are instead of the way you should have been.

    The ques­tion of whether some stan­dard of ade­qua­cy is being met is NOT RELEVANT. You’re either in the present moment as it is, or you’re in a hypo­thet­i­cal alter­nate uni­verse. Where you keep won­der­ing why the laws of physics nev­er quite get fol­lowed correctly.

    But to get back to more mun­dane issues of expect­ing your­self to live up to a stan­dard of ade­qua­cy… note that judg­ing your­self is an active process, and in prin­ci­ple all you have to do is just cease activ­i­ty in that area, and you’ve got self-accep­tance. Plus a bunch of spare ener­gy that you were pre­vi­ous­ly wast­ing on fight­ing yourself.

    For most peo­ple, the fear to be faced that obstructs self-accep­tance is the idea that if you don’t mon­i­tor your­self and crit­i­cize your­self, then you won’t do what needs to be done — you’ll turn lazy. Well, if that was the kind of approach that pro­duced con­struc­tive self-improve­ment, IT WOULD HAVE WORKED BY NOW. In prac­tice, even a pure­ly intel­lec­tu­al deci­sion along self-improve­ment lines works bet­ter than one encum­bered with this crap.

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