Self care tips for the pessimistic

There's a lot of ideas out there about the best ways to view your life and the things that might be a part of it - things like your body, your relationships, your career, your perspective on the deeper things. It can be overwhelming to sift through all the possible beliefs to decide which ones are best for you. It can feel like you're drowning in a sea of other people's identities, without having any idea what yours is, and not being able to swim without it. But it can also be helpful to lay out some of these conflicting ideas and reflect on what about them you like and dislike. Countering the parts of others' thinking that doesn't feel healing to you can nudge you toward the things that might be healing for you. You are your own person, and the perspectives you hold on your personal life are yours and yours alone. Respecting others' right to have their own values doesn't mean you have to share all of them. It's ok to coexist sometimes without agreeing, and it's better to admit you disagree than lie to yourself and others, because that won't make you happy in the end. Living from your own values allows you to thrive and that's better for you and everyone in your life.

When you have an extended period of suffering to the point that it feels like it will never let up, the way you think about life and it's rewards and detriments changes. A lot of people who haven't had that experience of prolonged suffering and lack don't understand this, and so they're prone to blame you for your continued suffering by implying that you should have tried harder to prepare for the future or to keep your motivation up. They'll often even say that suffering builds character, and that even though you put yourself in this position due to your lack of character, the suffering itself will provide by teaching you what you need to pull yourself out of it. That sounds well and good - after all, isn't it easier to think that your misfortune is just a detour and that it will right itself, than that there's no way out of it? Unfortunately, what the people espousing this perspective fail to understand - because they've only experienced suffering in small, short bouts, and not on its own - is that suffering alone can't teach you how to fight for yourself, but suffering interspersed with relief from that suffering can. Constantly having nothing or close to noting - whether financially, socially, or mentally - only teaches you to scramble constantly and without rest to fix every problem that comes up. The accusations that if you would have planned better, your problems wouldn't have piled up, are no good to you, because all the skill at planning ahead doesn't help when you don't have something to plan for. For example, say my card gets declined when I'm trying to buy groceries because I don't have any money in my account. Someone looking at the situation simplistically might say, "well, maybe you should have planned better and not spent your money on other things." That might be true, or it might not - maybe I did spend all of my last paycheck on movie tickets and ice cream, and maybe it's been a long time since I've had a lot of money and I've been stretching it out. Regardless, even if I come to the realization on my own that I should have planned better, it's useless to point that out unless I know I will have an opportunity to do better - if I know I have another paycheck coming, for instance, that's going to be enough for everything I need. The problem with saying that people are prolonging their own misery through poor habits is that it neglects the fact that misery itself changes the way you view your resources. If all you have is $100 and you know you're not going to get money for a while, your first impulse is to spend it quickly while you can, to get the things that are immediate needs, and that prevents you from planning for needs you might not even know about. It's hard to say, ok, I won't buy as much food now, because what if I have medical expenses in a month, because going down that path can lead to needless worry, since literally anything could come up. If something does come up later, wishing you had planned ahead doesn't do anything because if you hadn't spent that money, it would have just been sitting around doing nothing for you while you had needs that were unfulfilled. This can lead you into a way of thinking about your resources that's just day to day - fix this problem first, then come up with a way to fix the next one when you get to it. It's not because you're lazy, or greedy, but because it doesn't make sense to plan for wealth you won't have and the spending habits that come along with it. (I used money as an example because it's pretty straightforward, but this also applies to other resources. Like, if you only get to see a loved one for a week a year, you'll want to fully enjoy that time with them, not to spend it all planning for the next time you'll see each other, since it's so far off. Or if you have a chronic illness and you only have the spoons to either make food or fill out a job application, but not both, you're probably not going to choose to go hungry so that you can plan for a non-guarunteed future so that you can make money to afford to order food more often.) However, say that instead of trying to stretch out my remaining money, I have a stable job and know for certain I have a paycheck coming, because I've already worked the hours and just have to wait for the pay date. In that case, if I were to say "oops, shouldn't have spent all that money the other day", it's easier to forgive myself, since I know that I'll be able to buy more food soon. That reduces my frustration/embarrassment at having my card declined from a big problem to a mild annoyance. If I know I'll have money soon, all I need to do is buy a bit less food and wait it out. But if I don't have money coming, my focus will be on finding a way to get food anyway - whether by borrowing money from a friend or asking for help from my parents or even taking a risk like stealing. Or maybe I'll just go hungry until I find a way to get money. That doesn't teach me any "better" habits that would supposedly help me - it just teaches me how to make unhealthy sacrifices (and how to ask for help out of desperation). It's nothing like how privileged people say I'm supposed to pull myself up by my bootstraps, because the bootstraps themselves are fragile and keep breaking when I tug on them. And every time I do, they last less and less time before they snap again. That's what it's like suffering through the experience of constantly not having your needs fulfilled. The more life gets you down, the more you expect it to get you down again, so the more you settle into planning for dealing with the inevitable disappointment - and the less you want to risk making changes in the interest of things getting better, because if they don't, your plans are useless, and you wasted time you could have been using to fix things in the present. The point here is that nobody who's doing better than you is doing it because they have better character/habits/work ethic/optimism than you. They're doing it because they don't have to worry about constant and repeated lack like you do, because they have been conditioned in their life to expect abundance in the future even when it isn't there in the present. The sufferings they face are short-term, and there's ample grace in between for them to recover. This grace comes from support systems you might not have, histories of privilege that you might not relate to, and opportunities for fixing things that you might not have access to. It's absolutely not your fault, and you're not expected to compensate for their success by working harder. Sometimes what you really need to do is acknowlege that you're in a tricky situation and that you're doing what you've always done - the best you can, no matter whether other people believe it's your best or not. Sometimes, the world provides, and sometimes you're stuck in the garbage heap wondering if it will ever provide for you again. That's hard enough without being told that you did something to land yourself in the trash. It's ok for things to take a long time. It's ok to not feel like you're learning from your suffering, or that your suffering is for a reason. It's ok to acknowlege that you don't have what you need, and to focus on getting it, instead of proving that you're a person who deserves it. If you're stuck day-to-day trying to make the best of things, whether it's in your life or your health or anything, that's a perfectly blameless way to live your life for now, and you haven't done anything wrong to get there.

The hurtful things that the world has made you feel about yourself? Show them to God. List them out, say, "God, I feel this and this and this and this, and I'm convinced that that's the way it ought to be." Let loose the feelings you keep tied tightly away, for just a moment, set them free into the space between you and God, and look at them in full for just a minute, and know that as you see them all, so does God. And God will work in your heart and in the hearts you share with those around you to take those things away. To turn them from vile demons that bite you into mere words that support you and fight with you to make the world right and just, as you want it, as God wants it. And someday you will speak up about these things again, out loud this time, to other humans this time, and you will say, instead of "I feel all these things, and they must be true," "I used to feel all these things, but I know they must not be true, because God has shown me that they heal away, leaving only a memory, safely coated in soft love." And the demons will not hurt you any more.

But we have this - we know there can be better. Maybe after our lives end. Maybe before. We have this weapon, pre-forged, of the knowledge that all of this is wrong. We think we’re falling, but maybe we have somewhere to stand, to fight from, and to fight to get back to. You’re broken, but only for now. If we can say we are broken, we can say that it’s possible to not be. We prove that there’s a state distinct from broken that somewhere exists, a home waiting for us even if right now we’re still stuck in the wilderness. I know that and so do you. We can talk about it. Word by word, make a plan to get out. It’s not ok yet, but for now, we write.

My mentally ill and likely autistic ass needs to stop beating itself up for not being able to do everything I was in church earlier and worried and I just imagined all my mistakes floating around me like tiny bubbles and then silently winking out and disappearing with no further acknowledgement. No guilt. No punishment. No consequences. No worries. Just grace. The kind of world we need to live in. It's not our fault for having a hard time. We don't need to carry that. Letting things settle again. I've decided against all reason to come out to my conservative friends because I just don't want to live a lie. I don't know how I'm gonna bring it up or how I'm gonna get through it. But I know God gets it. He understands. He accepts me. He loves me including my queerness, not despite it. Even if this turns out messy He will smooth it out in time. I will heal from the pain, the rejection, the loss. I won't be alone forever. There's always somewhere to go. I don't know how to proceed. I'm scared of what's gonna happen and I'm not sure if I can trust myself to articulate myself well enough to make them understand. But that's not my job and all I can do is my best. I'm not all the way to believing that yet. I think I do believe that it's not worthless to try. You can survive even in the middle of the storm.