Evading the Inevitable

“the ways you have learned to survive may not be the ways you wish to continue to live“

“Do it scared” but please realize that, if you Do It Scared too much and don’t let yourself rest + relax + have fun in between, you will fuck yourself up. If you “do it scared” all day every day, you will burn out badly and quickly. Sometimes this is temporarily necessary but please keep this in mind.

When you “do it scared” eventually you’re supposed to be less scared, eventually doing it scared is supposed to teach you the worst won’t happen, or it won’t be as bad as you think it is, or that the best outcomes are worth it, or you’re more capable than you thought you were. If you do it scared over and over and you’re still scared and you’re always scared, maybe it was never about pushing yourself, maybe something bigger is going on and what you really need is to be kind to yourself while you figure out what that is.

What?!

cool self isolation bro now what if the people you’re hiding from truly love you and want to care for you

Note: Brintellix -> Trintellix for those who didn’t know this brand changed trademark names.

god my brain is so hardwired to feel ashamed after any social interaction that even after there's objectively nothing to feel ashamed over i still feel terrible

Brb replacing "I should" with "I have the option/opportunity to" in my internal monologue re: beating myself up over shit that needs doing. Let's see if that works.

It actually really did help and I did the laundry and cat boxes. Guess I'll keep trying that one.

My psychiatrist told me this early on working with him. Every time I said "I should" he would be horrified and urge me to replace it with "I could." It took a lot of practice but my life is so much better for it because it replaces the pressure of external obligations with my own agency.

every time i'm caught on a "should" i try to reframe it as "if I want [a certain result], then doing [thing] can help me get there". It does double duty of taking the guilt out of the "should" while still reinforcing the motivation of WHY my brain pinged "should" in the first place. Or it even works to make me realize that i care less about the result than i think i'm """meant""" to and I can safely de-prioritize it

When I start getting too deep into the "I should"s, my therapist says "don't should yourself." It's dumb, it's silly, and it sticks with me haha

You can’t deserve a person’s love. You’ll drive yourself crazy thinking like that. They either love you, or they don’t. That doesn’t mean you weren’t good enough for them to love you, because love isn’t something you earn by being good enough. It isn’t something that can be quantified or doled out. Don’t blame yourself for not being loved how you need to, just teach yourself how to look for love where love lives.

This isn’t just about romantic love, or even skewed towards romantic love, although it does apply there too. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to accept is that my mother simply wasn’t someone who was capable of loving me, and there is no version of me that I could have ever been that would have earned that love. But with acceptance came healing. I was able to love myself more instead of resenting myself for not being more than any one person could be.

Are you listening? Even love for yourself isn’t earned. It is a kindness you give yourself.