This week I talk about one of my pet peeve turns of phrase. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I won’t reiterate my take on it here, because I already discussed it in the vlog (which you should totally go watch, plug plug). Instead, let me turn my attention to a very different one that is still related. “The fix is in.”
This is a sports term. It has to do with the outcome of a contest being ‘fixed’ or rigged. And in the context of those contests, and any betting associated with it, it’s a bad thing. But let’s think about it in terms of storytelling. A fictional tale always has a fixed ending. While characters grow and change, their arcs are also fixed, at least in terms of their anchors throughout the tale. Authors set their characters up for either success or failure, pretty much from the beginning.
I think, as individuals, we owe it to ourselves to set ourselves up, too.
Setting yourself up for success takes a conscious effort. It’s an idea I’ve heard more and more about as I’ve worked as a barista. Beans, pitchers of milk, sleeves for cups – these are all things that can be stocked or prepared to make future work easy for co-workers. As individuals, we can, and probably should, sort our thoughts, emotions, and internal processes into helpful patterns. This takes time, and often external help, but it’s setting ourselves up for success. It’s putting in the fix. It’s giving you a sure thing on which to bet – yourself.
The alternative is setting yourself up for failure.
I don’t necessarily mean failure in an immediate, dramatic sense. Failing yourself doesn’t always take a catastrophic form. In some cases, failure is a state of being. It’s not a failure in acting, it’s a failure to act. If we do not challenge ourselves to change, to look at ourselves as complex beings and seek improvement as well as the correction of mistakes, we fail ourselves. It requires honesty. It requires being proactive. It requires deep breaths, introspection, and more than a couple hard conversations. Where did I go wrong? What mistakes did I make? How did my failures come across to others? Can I make amends? Will I be able to learn from my downfalls, rather than repeating them?
Are you up for it? Are you willing to take an active role in your own progress towards a better version of yourself?
Can you make yourself a sure thing for yourself and others to bet on?
They say “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” How are they wrong, at least when it comes to working on ourselves, expressing ourselves, and how we see ourselves? Join in our quest for answers and mine for the optimal sound setup.
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We hear all sorts of voices every day. None are more pervasive and frightening than those that come from within. They can amplify what we hear from others, or contradict the good things we’re told, or even drown out support and reinforcement from people we care about. There are two very important skills that I feel one needs to learn in order to overcome these distractions and potential downfalls: learn to listen to the right voices, and have the agency to listen to our own, true voice.
As I maintain in this week’s vlog, our feelings, and the voices that emerge from them, are not invalid. They do come from honest places, even if they are places we do not recognize or want to acknowledge within us. The Shadow contains all sorts of things – fears, ambitions, instincts, hatreds, doubts, etc – and it is up to our conscious mind to evaluate those things and parse the useful and constructive from the antiquated, the superfluous, or the ridiculous. You see, ‘valid’ and ‘useful’ are not the same thing. It’s a valid want to plop oneself down on the couch and flip on a glowing screen for hours, but how useful is that when there is work to be done? Granted, some time lost in mindless entertainment can be useful for self-care, but so can a minor chore like washing dishes or sorting out laundry, and those have the advantage of organizing our lives and allowing more space for focused self-care.
The point is, the voices we struggle to live with and understand are valid, necessary parts of our psyches. I use the visceral imagery of “Josh-that-was” to place my previous, short-sighted, self-deceptive, and ultimately ruinous behavior in a category of useless, old, and broken thoughts. While I myself may not be “broken” or “crazy”, the fact is that things did break in the course of Josh-that-was doing what it did. My heart, the hearts of others, the trust of others, and so many other things that haunt me and pain me to this day, and may do so for the rest of my life. I may never make it right. I may never get closure. And I have to accept that as a possibility. The price of the actions of Josh-that-was. The punishment for those acts. The scars left behind on my soul.
Ugh. This is getting maudlin. Back to my point.
If we can manage to look forward, towards a better version of ourselves that is worth working towards, we can better determine which of the voices we hear every day support and build upon that goal, and which ones hold us back. This is not to say that such voices do not have their uses. Self-correction is an essential part of the growth process. Without it, we can slip into the stream of our own bullshit without realizing it, and start bathing in it before we know what’s going on. We have to be aware of our potential downfalls and incoming hazards. We have to grasp our emotional and mental demons and wrestle them to the ground. We have to imagine ourselves as complexly as we do others, see our flaws for what they are, and figure out how best to overcome, integrate, or work around them.
We must, indeed, check ourselves before we wreck ourselves.
And that means, knowing which of our voices are worth listening to.
For example, I could listen to the voices telling me to delve into the Internet at the dark hours of the night, when other, more insidious ones drag me towards a past I am working so hard to move away from. They encourage me to look into the lives of those with whom I’ve lost contact. I know, in my rational mind, that this sort of thing always leaves me feeling depressed, lonely, and thoroughly angry at the supidity of the actions of Josh-that-was. I still feel the impulse to click, to read, to scroll. It’s very difficult to shout down that voice. But it isn’t useful. It isn’t constructive. It teaches me nothing new, it lends me no strength or courage, and I ultimately have better things to do with my time and energy.
This sort of thing is tiring. Have you ever shouted or sang or cried until your throat hurt? Imagine that process within your own mind. Sometimes you have to shout to let your voice be heard. You have to sing at the top of your metaphorical lungs even if nobody is listening – some would say, especially if nobody is listening. It’s the best way, sometimes the only way, to keep ourselves in check and on a path to positive, constructive growth. Over the last few months I’ve metaphorically shouted myself raw at times to make sure I am taking steps away from what I was. It’s the only way I know to keep myself on this path. By myself. For myself.
Even when it hurts, much like exercise or growth, we have to listen to the right voice. We have to focus on the ones from within us that want us to succeed. It can take effort, and time, and leave you exhausted and worn out. But it’s something we all have to learn. If we want to grow into the people we’ve seen ourselves as being, the people we deserve to be, and the people around us deserve to be with, we have to learn to listen for those right voices.
Voices in our heads! What do they mean? Where do they come from? How do we express them? This week we learn how our feelings become things that have voices of their own.
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Not because they are strange things, or because I don’t understand them. I do. I know consent is a vital, essential thing, and you cannot and should not cross into someone else’s comfort zone without that consent. When you do, apologize and back out. At least, if the offended party tells you directly. They may take other action if they feel deeply uncomfortable or threatened. Or simply slam the metaphorical door in your face. And that’s fine. At the end of the day, we must take care of ourselves on an individual, internal level. And that can mean avoiding the external to whatever degree we must to maintain or reinforce our comfort zones.
All of that is comprehensive and understandable to me. It doesn’t make me uncomfortable.
My relationship with me, my own comfort zone, and how it’s interacted with others… those things do.
Josh has been one of those people who’s stumbled headlong into someone else’s comfort zone, crashing through a wall Kool-Aid man style if the Kool-Aid man was a well-meaning but ultimately destructive doofus. That’s probably the kindest I’ve been to Josh when regarding his mistakes. I do feel that, for the most part, his heart was in the right place, at least most of the time. While it doesn’t change the fact that Josh made bad decisions regarding getting along with other people, trying to imagine him complexly helps me not want to dig up his corpse and shoot him again.
The othering of my past self is something I’ve been working on. The more I change, the more I examine myself, the more I become acquainted with everything inside of me from my Shadow to my action matching intention to (I’m getting to it) my comfort zone, the more I feel the distance between who I am now, and what I was before. And because of my actions, because of the influence and insight of those I love, because of my stubborn refusal to swim in my own fucking bullshit for one second longer, that past self, that Josh, is a thing. A corpse. A creature, an individual, that I kicked to its knees, shot twice in the head, and buried in an unmarked grave out back. Josh-that-was. He is no more.
I am very uncomfortable referring to who I was and what I did before in the first person. It fucks with my comfort zone.
When I catch myself doing it, some of the emotional creatures – the “head weasels” that appeared regularly in Innercom Chatter (which I really need to get back to doing) – start crying out more loudly. Anxiety, contrition, depression, and anger all claw and squeal for my attention, to buy into whatever it is they’re selling. The idea that I have not changed. The idea that I still need to be punished further for what Josh-that-was did. The idea that sustainable happiness, sustainable Relationships, sustainable peace, are things I will never truly know. The idea that I should just get out of the sight of everyone I know before I do something else fucking stupid.
These feelings, not invalid, come from honest places, deep and dark ones. I do my utmost to not act on them, as those actions would have consequences, while the feelings themselves do not. I keep telling myself that.
I worry that’s more of my own bullshit talking.
Then I remember that just admitting that I have these fears, these worries, in a broadcast as loud as I can make it to anyone willing to listen places me apart from a lot of people. I’m focused on the path in front of me, the one I walk by myself. I have people in my corner, as well as their own corners, shouting support as loud as they can to make sure I can hear. And I shout it to myself. Sometimes in a whisper, sometimes at the top of my voice. Whatever I need, when I need it, however I need it.
Sure, I’ll have moments of discomfort. I’ll have bad moments where I lose sight of my goal. I’ll stumble and pinwheel my arms to keep myself from falling into that threatening but inviting stream of flowing self-deceptive antiquated childish bullshit that still runs beneath all I’ve worked to build within myself.
But this is within my comfort zone. This is something I can and will control. I will continue to be honest, clearly and immediately and consistently honest, growing and nurturing the things that matter to me, reaching out to those I love, and making damn sure my footing on my path is certain and that, at the end of the day, I love myself like my life depends on it.
