Perhaps it’s fate that keeps us stuck in the belly of the dragon, or maybe it’s something larger than life, maybe it’s my neighbor John, whatever it is, it’s definitely one of these three things.
But in all seriousness, why do we keep repeating old mistakes again and again? Didn’t we figure this out like two weeks ago? I remember a time during which I was exercising perfectly, sleeping perfectly and eating perfectly, my social life was bliss and my job was paying well, now who knows when I sleep, my nutrition is chips and cookie dough and exercise was all but a distant dream.
Problems like these affect all of us and of course, what these problems are exactly is dependent on our unique circumstances and who we are. But I’m sure a lot of us sometimes feel like we should’ve figured these things out by now, so what’s going on?
The Pull of Life
Have you heard about this theory that states we’re all on fixed paths and regardless of what we may do, we’re all destined to be pulled along? Now I’m not the biggest believer of things like this, especially since it’s kinda vague, but maybe it’s onto something here. Maybe the reason that we keep falling into old habits is because there’s something that we’re supposed to learn, something that we’re supposed to understand.
Now if I knew what that is I could just tell you the answer but since we’re all different, the answer that works for me is going to be completely different from what works for you.
But maybe we can get pretty close.
I believe that if we’re falling into old habits again and again, it’s not because we didn’t figure out what needed to be done, it’s because we deluded ourselves into believing that now that we know it, it will automatically fix whatever caused us to fall into these bad habits in the first place.
For example, Jenny, like a lot of people, doesn’t know who she is. Deep down she feels like she’ll never know. Yet, out of the wisdom of a podcast she likes to listen to, she learns that the way you find direction in life is by picking something and just doing it until you get good at it. So she picks up programming and starts working every day. After a week, she’s burned out and really doesn’t want to learn more about the data types that Javascript processes, she wants to do something else, but if she let’s herself go down this road, she’ll be exactly where she started and she doesn’t want that either.
Does any of this resonate with you? Maybe your problem isn’t your identity but the fact that you always feel bad and don’t know why. Regardless of what your issue is, there is only one real thing to understand: some of us aren’t meant to know.
Anti-climactic, I know, but if you give it a chance, you might come to like it. Why am I telling you all this? It’s because this is how I feel. I know that I don’t know where I’m going to go or who I am, yet I’ve pretended all my life that I do. One day, I got fed up with how anxious this made me feel and told myself that I guess I’m just never going to know who I am.
Do you know what happened? I stopped trying to fix it. No more solutions, concepts, self-help books, nothing mattered to me anymore. I stopped looking at my problems as things that needed to be fixed and I stopped feeling like I was failing at getting to where I wanted to be.
Most importantly, bad habits stopped becoming bad habits, they turned into things that I was doing in order to avoid seeing the truth. Instead of accepting that I might be someone who doesn’t know who I am, it was easier pretending to be someone else.
Regardless of how I try to pull away, the more I try to pretend to be something I’m not, the stronger my true identity is going to pull me back to face the truth.
You can imagine how this changed the whole idea of what it meant to fall into bad habits in the first place. If I stop trying to change myself, doing things become a lot easier. That’s because I’m no longer fighting with myself, If I choose to do something, I do it because I want to, not because I’m scared of not knowing who I am or not feeling good.
And when I started living this way, it became a lot easier to maintain the habits I truly wanted to keep in my life and get rid of the ones that weren’t doing me any good, even if the world would disagree with me.
What was once an exercise habit I put in place in order to get myself to know who I am or feel good is now an exercise habit that I’ve put in place because it’s something I want to have in my life, no impure reasons, no fighting with myself.
Do you think you will be able to feel like this too?
I sincerely hope that you do.
Raghav Mehra 