I spent 20 years of my life trying to 'prove myself'. What a mistake

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/12/judging-ourselves-can-mean-impossible-standards

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I was sitting in my therapist's office. I had screwed up again. I don't even remember what it was, but I remember how I felt.

It was a year since I had been released from a mental hospital, and months after returning to some of my past addictions. I was confused, lost, and feeling absolutely pathetic.

I remember how those words were starting to come out with him, just word after word of how bad I felt, how lost … and he just sat quietly listening.

But I could feel there was something more, something deeper, and it kept coming close to my lips and then disappearing. I needed so badly to get it out.

So I stopped myself. I looked at him. I took a deep breath.

"I'm afraid … I'm afraid that I'm a bad person."

I knew the words were real because I felt this immediate recognition of truth inside of me. Yes, this was my fear, what I was so afraid of. He asked me why. I explained how time after time, I screwed up, I hurt people with my screwups, and that I never seemed to really recover from my failures. The only answer that I could come up with was that I was inherently flawed. That there was something wrong with me, something broken.

When I look back on that day, what I realize is that this was the first step in a larger realization of the way I looked at the world, and how I looked at myself. When I review my life, I am amazed at how I spent so much of it worrying about the possibility that there was something "wrong" with me.

Despite going to "gifted" classes, I never seemed to be interested in school. I had anger problems, I would let out my frustrations on my parents with yelling, with huge fights. I was addicted to practically everything that was "bad" for me, from video games to gambling to pot. As the years progressed, I just got more sucked in.

In my mind, there was a case being built against me. Even though I wasn't religous, I subconsciously imagined some divine detective gathering evidence every time I screwed up. Soon, I was convinced, the evidence would be so stacked against me that I would simply have to accept it: I was bad.

Of course, those thoughts never consciously entered my mind until that day in the therapist's office. But there were indications. I always seemed to be much more worried about what people thought of me than how I actually acted. I would sometimes obsess over a tiny mistake, verbally abusing myself for it, calling myself names and generally hating myself. Often, I would judge friends and people close to me just as harshly. If they hurt me, something I judged as "wrong", it would be almost impossible for me to let it go. I would drop them, convincing myself I had left the "bad" people.

And so my life went. Judging myself and others by what I felt was inherently within us: a goodness or a badness. A completeness or a brokenness. That day in the therapist's office, after I told him about my ultimate fear: that I too was a bad person, he started questioning me. He asked me, "Define you."

I tried and I tried. I came up with about a million definitions, but he refuted them all. There was no way to define me. No way to pin down what I was. I was just … a soul.

"You keep trying to pin down this 'you'," he told me, "But that's no way to live. You are indefinable. And your life is spent just trying to be the best of that indefinable self." He's a deep guy.

It took me some time to wrap my head around what he said. Maybe it was only recently that I truly grasped it. But he laid a seed in my mind. The seed grew into a full-on realization. The realization that when we live our lives like they are already defined, like someone set our soul in stone and all we have time left to do is prove to the world that this soul is worthy … then we are missing out on the most important fact of life.

The fact that the world, including us, is in constant motion. From the particles that make up physical reality, to the planets themselves, to our own physical selves. Physical reality is constantly evolving, constantly growing, constantly changing. There is no way to completely pin it down, to grab a hold of it and make it all stop and say, "This is the state it will always be in!" And the same is true with us.

I spent 20 years of my life trying to prove to myself that I was worthy. I saw every failure as a sign that I was worthless. Part of the evidence against my soul. I saw every success as something I had to grab onto, hold onto for dear life for whenever the court case was brought against me.

Relationships were the same way. Instead of spending my time loving friends and family, giving to them, I was always building a case for and against them, weighing whether they deserved my attention.

This is no way to live, this "judgment". And it's not just about morality. It's about reality. Judgment implies a fixed-state of things. It implies no change. It implies lack of growth. But life is the opposite of fixed. Life is a verb. An action. A motion.

And so are we. Until our bodies are dead, frozen and decomposing in the ground, we are creations in motion. When we accept this reality, we can accept ourselves. We can focus on our actions.

As this realization has oozed its way into my mind, I've learned to embrace failure as a part of my ever-evolving attempts to grow into a better person. I've learned to realize that love is a verb, that my wife and I grow together, and aren't defined by any one negative interaction. I've learned to stop trying to impress people.

I've learned that I am a verb. And the more I embrace that, the more I focus on the verbs of life and the less I focus on defining it.