The Trouble with Seeing Double

Today, the story I’m telling myself is; if I continue to move toward my goals it will ultimately only cause more loss than is already inevitable. Getting married means that I will have to endure the loss of someone I love deeply to death or divorce. To have children is to endure the pain of rejection from people who I’ll love more than anyone I’ve ever loved and who I would hope would be capable of giving me the unconditional love I truly desire. Deep down, I know that even if they wanted to, they will never love me unconditionally because they are human and thus incapable of perfect love.

The underlying point here is that I avoid in order to avoid.

Avoiding what I want means I won’t ever have to endure losing it. I avoid the unimaginable pain of having the very thing I thought would satisfy me and recieving the non-debatable feedback that, “It will never satisfy me, because it can’t.” Deep down I know this and its why I don’t want to pursue my precise dream. It gets even more sticky when you consider my need for growth and improvement in order to be happy.

So how do I grow and improve if I also have to avoid failure for the sake of my emotional health? Let me explain.

Step one: Recognition. This is when I become aware that there is a problem. Usually you don’t have to discover problems. Life’s circumstances reveal them.

Step two: Engage. Often the pain of staying the same will be greater than the pain of staying the same. This is when you choose to do something that puts you on the path to change. Telling someone, assessing where you fell short, creating a plan. All of these are ways to begin on the path toward “healing”.

Step three: Improve. This usually doesn’t take long. You begin taking action that coincides with the goal and improvements ensue.

Step four: Limitation. You will inevitably run into challenges on the way toward the success you seek. What you do when you run into something is the a biggest indicator of success. Hands down.

Step six: Avoid. This can be done through ignoring, distracting or numbing. The means don’t matter as much as the end.

Step seven: Repeat. This is where you go back up to step one and repeat the cycle. The problem with this is you’ll get all of the satisfaction again, even though you’ve gone through this journey before.

You can stay in this cycle for the rest of your life and feel like you’re growing when truly, you’re repeating the same year over and over and getting more efficient at your redundancy.

Scary.