With a lot of gratitude to offer, I inch closer to a new year looking forward to many good things incoming. What’s worth sharing here, however, is the battle with self-sabotage that I am still overcoming, but have made considerable progress with in 2023.
A therapist would tell me a number of things about why I’m constantly scared of losing the good things that have come to me generously. I must admit, I have managed to rummage through the logical parts of the internet and my own mind, and find some reasonable explanations for my lasting struggle with self-sabotage. Where I come from, there are no therapists so we end up finding our own way through what seems to everyone like a rather creamy layer struggle. I don’t deny that it is creamy layer; which is why I said at the beginning that there are ample things I’m thankful for.
Self-sabotage begins with a looming feeling that things ought to go wrong anyways, because the graph of life, by nature, is not a straight line. There are bound to be dips in the journey. Acceptance of this fact is a good thing, but the problem arises when we can’t stop and enjoy the good parts of life because we wait, scared and anxious, for the next bad thing. It’s a terrible thing to live like that.
In the year 2023 I became aware of this problem I have, and I’ve made it a point to find my way out of it. After all, the unknown is completely out of my control and hence fear of the unknown has no logical explanation or result whatsoever. Even with complete understanding of this fact, I can’t help the creepy thoughts that find their way to me yet. So for now, I’m sticking to feel good things like prayer and gratitude, preached excitedly by an endless number of spiritual Gurus on Youtube. It has worked. And with consistency, it has made me better at spirituality and thankfulness in general; so that’s a bonus.
The internet is full of prayer and gratitude rituals that anyone can practice. While a lot of it is over-excited young adults encashing the hopeless viewer base like myself, some of them do make sense and the little activities they prescribe do help me take one day at a time in this long journey. I am aware that the tendency to self-sabotage takes extreme forms in many people and becomes an existential struggle. Thankfully, I’m not on that level and I’m cautious not to go there either. The first step is always the ability to recognize when we are thinking or doing something that’s not reasonable. When we can manage that, a lot of problems have easy solutions available at our disposal. What I hope is that the spiritual Gurus on the internet end up making people more aware of themselves as well, for that does not come naturally to a lot of troubled people. After all, we can only seek help or solutions if we are aware that we are troubled.
So alongside all the eventful things, 2023 has also seen me silently fight a small mental battle and stay on the winning side. I don’t want to whine and make it sound worse than it is, but I don’t want to belittle the repercussions of self-sabotaging tendencies either. Every little difficulty deserves effort for betterment, and that’s what I’ve done for myself. I’ll continue to do the same until the little good things can overshadow the one problem source. The next year’s ‘year-end post’ will hopefully be more cheerful than this.
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