Part Of Self-Care Is Learning How To Stop Self-Sabotaging
There’s a club most people belong to. It’s less invitation-only and more action-prompted invite. You have an awesome situation, a path towards growth and progress, then out of nowhere a mountain, a problem, a destructive choice that snowballs into destructive consequences that’s piled on by a suffocating guilt. The action triggers self-destruction and spirals into questioning worthiness and our ability to belong, and whether it’s a thing we need to take hold of ourselves or a feeling that’s gifted to us.
I’ve found it to be a mix of both. The more you decide you want to belong the more you find places that hold you when you’re joyous or when you’re finding your way through self-destructive habits. They key to joining the club is admitting you’re the owner of a little bit of both.
I’d go as far as to say that we all are. I’m really good at self-destructing. It comes to me naturally and more often than not it starts with the holding-my-breath-waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop feeling that is really uncomfortable to sit in. I learned that if I acted on impulse to tear down things preemptively maybe I didn’t have to sit in the suspended feeling of things going right and having to wait for something to go wrong.
How fucked is that? Honestly, like who wants to be the proud owner of tearing down their own happiness just because it may hit some rough patches as it grows into more happiness?
It sounds completely irrational that someone would do this and yet I’ve done it more than once. I’ve done it so often that not doing it wasn’t just about stopping it, but it was about unlearning it. I had to unlearn how to not fuck myself over so that I could relearn how to be happy without acting on my impulse to be suspicious of my happiness.
When I look at the self-care conversations that are so often had today, I wonder where the messiness is. I think long and hard about whether they’re offering me ways to make the already smoothed out parts of me a bit more smooth or whether they’re factoring in the open wounds I have that need a specific kind of healing.
Part of self-care is learning not to self-sabotage.
Self-care is about finding the courage to figure out why you do.
I’m messy. The parts of my life don’t fit together into one perfect big puzzle. My versions of self-care and self-love are so tangled up in healing, therapy, and learning to be the best human stop sign to my unhealthy habits that some days I don’t know where the healing begins and the unhealthy habits end. It’s okay to be that messy and in the progress of figuring out how to not be your worst enemy.
You don’t ever earn a point where you’re worthy of stopping old habits and replacing them with new ones. The invitation to the club is extended often and where you’re standing right now.
There are so many corners of my life that I still have a lot of shame about, but there are others that I’ve cracked open just enough to remind me why I do it. You get to hone your awareness muscle just as much as you do every other muscle in your being. Becoming more aware of who you are, where your impulses rest, and how they’re triggered is not the added bonus to how you self-care or tackle your mental wellness, it’s the biggest part of the process.
And if it’s a messy hodgepodge of so many layers, welcome to the club.
I write about mental health, grief, and life’s every day challenges on vivnunez.com.
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