Self improvement risks becoming a fashionable way to beat yourself up
I don’t know about you but I can only read a book if I am not wearing trousers.
I started a new training course recently - it’s a year long and requires you to have completed 50 hours of therapy at the same time. (Once again, I find myself paying vast amounts of money to be tortured and not even in a sexy way). On this first night of lecturing, there were 35 of us sitting in a circle, all wide-eyed and weighing each other up.
We can’t escape this undignified primate jostling - it goes on even in these ‘aware’ self-development environments. It’s sometimes even worse actually, because there’s an unspoken understanding you’re meant to be rising above this - so no one wants to show it. That means it can get all twisted up and go underground.
I have a monkey mind with an expansive vocabulary and a long list of spiritual sounding excuses for why I am on my second packet of biscuits and going through my ex’s instagram page. It’s aversion therapy. Or something.
It doesn’t matter how many books I read, or minutes I sit in meditation - underneath it all I am a very bad monkey. When I entered the room that first evening, about 45 different assessments crowded in at once:
Who was my age,
Who looked like a fun person to hang out with,
Who looked too cool for me
Who looked too geeky for me,
Who had good shoes on
Was there anyone I possibly would want to sleep with…
I really am not above this kind of thing, even if I try and disengage with it.
And apparently neither is anyone else.
During our coffee breaks, the question du jour was ‘how long have you been in therapy for then?’. It took me a while before I realised I’d heard this sort of question intoned before.
At university, in posh circles, where people asked you what school you went to. Heaven forbid you’d have to confess to going to a minor public school. Or worse - a DAY school. There were various other complex social ranking systems around (never say ‘toilet’, I believe was one of them) but I was never very good at knowing them or caring about them, due to being a little vague and unfortunately not actually being that posh.
It’s all OK though darling, I can do this, I went to Cheltenham Ladies college. (A photo from my uni years)
You can leave Cheltenham Ladies College but wherever you go there’s a pecking order - and in the circles I tend to find myself in now, there’s a particularly pernicious one, and it’s this hideous unspoken evaluation of how ‘healed’ you are.
How high is your vibe? How integrated are your masculine and feminine principles? How ‘healthy’ is your relationship? Oh, your boundaries need work, poor you. And how long have you been sober for? And yes, OK you might be clean but are you emotionally sober? And are you sober around money? Around sex? You’re not doing ‘the work’, you have to do ‘the work’. Get sober around food - get sober around relationships. Around your god damn fucking cat?
This cat is so sober. Look how sober this cat is.
This quest for perfection - albeit now some kind of healed clean perfection, is sending us all silly.
I read a Facebook post about a self care ‘regime’ yesterday. A regime!? Do you know who else has a regime? Kim Jong un. The North Korean dictator and human rights violator.
Self care is not a series of things you do to hit a target that will finally gain you access to the cool crowd, the hot women, the right jobs, the beautiful friends. Loving yourself up may accidentally come with some of these, because love is magnetic and feels good to people, but like all the spiritual ‘gifts’, by the time you have them, it won’t matter anyway. What a nightmare.
I say later that you can self-improve or self-care however you want and there’s no wrong way to do it. I do however proffer cautiously that if your self-care regime involves murder, that is in fact doing it wrong. I could be mistaken though - the universe is a bitch.
Self care, for me, is about how gently you treat yourself, as a part of this planet too. It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it.
Get yourself to yoga by all means, but it’s not necessary for you to bully yourself into doing it to tick a box. Do it because afterwards you feel good and you deserve that, even if your body feels sluggish right now and the jammy dodgers and doing some more emails are calling.
I just found this image very relaxing, and I thought I would add it in, because I made you look at Putin and Kim Jong un.
I know that regime can be used in many contexts, but I do think we’ve gone a bit totalitarian around self improvement. It’s all feeling a bit like ‘love yourself or you’re a bad person’ over in some corners of the internet. You must grow, you must be progressing and move forward and stretching yourself or you are dying, is the vibe I get in some places. (Spoiler: we are all dying).
It is really great to challenge yourself with big goals - like climbing that mountain - but don’t feel like you have to or you’ve failed either. Change perspective and watch what wants to come naturally.
Some of these self improvement instagram shots feel less like someone wanting to share a nice experience with the world, and more like ‘I am better than you - because look at how much I love myself….’
It’s energetically all over the shop. And sometimes I feel like screaming IT’S OK IF YOU DON’T LIKE YOURSELF MUCH RIGHT NOW IT DOESN’T MEAN YOU AREN’T AWESOME.
Self love and self improvement is this amazing thing that is getting a bit tangled up in places. We’ll get it right in the end.
Perhaps all this posturing is part of the process. It’s so hard being conscious enough to know what the problem is and what the possible solution is, but not yet conscious enough to actually do the thing and make the change and feel better in your own skin. AND THAT’S OK.
Sometimes we have to speak it out loud and talk about it and say it and act it before it comes true and fully gets integrated in our lives. It’s clumsy, but in this way we learn how to live it in the end.
Sometimes we can’t help it though.
I’m guilty of this too sometimes - it’s why I recognise it. I mean someone on Tinder asked me what I wanted the most one time and I replied ‘enlightenment’ in all earnestness and Dear God that makes me cringe. But the very thing about denial is you don’t know you’re doing it. The nightmare about being in an unconscious pattern is you won’t know you’re acting out. You might even feel peaceful. It might feel totally right.
I still get the good girl glow sometimes, because I did meditation AND yoga AND a gratitude list AND tidied my house and juiced something green. Not because those things make me feel good (they do, bar the green thing) but because ‘I self-cared perfectly ’.
So when someone asked me how long I had been in therapy for, I replied with ‘years’, with, in retrospect, a confusing amount of smugness, given the reality of what that actually means. Being a human is a rum business, that’s for sure. Especially a human that wants to improve.
It’s always the ominous tissue box that gets me in therapy rooms.
And the actual supplement is hard to swallow; that there’s no right way to do this shit. Relationships are difficult. People are amazing and awful and it’s confusing. There’s no formula that will shield you from pain.
And just as you think you’ve got it, something else happens. We are constantly ravelling and unravelling, whether it’s stuff from childhood or from school or from last week. Reaching our potential is endless and hard and ongoing.
We bleed and we shit and we fuck up and fail and say ugly things and lose people we love. We worry about money and moving house and what people think of us, and if we should follow our dreams, and what if we don’t have any, and what is our purpose and how can we carry on.
It’s hard man, not all the time, and there are glorious sweet bits too, but sometimes it sucks! That’s how it is - it’s not because you are doing it wrong.
For me, self care and self improvement is also about remembering that it’s hard being a human sometimes, and just because it sucks and I am hurting that doesn’t mean I am doing it wrong.
Self care means if I am a human who is struggling, I might need a few kind words and some gentleness in my environment. That might be doing something my body likes, or my heart likes, or just speaking to myself really sweetly like a small child, and appreciating that right now, I need a bit of grace. Putting tender attention on myself, and not subjecting myself to judgement. Not feeding the voices in my head that are someone else’s inner critic.
Sometimes we need to give ourselves a hug
When I am not hurting, what it means is doing a bit of maintenance work to help myself in case it gets hard later. Like getting groceries when you’re out, so you’ve got something in the fridge for when you’re hungry. I top up the self-love bank as I go along.
Self-care looks different for everyone, because everyone is different. If self-love for you looks like a spa day, good! That’s great. If self love for you means posting pictures of yourself naked online - also great! If self-care for you looks like allowing yourself to bitch sometimes - brilliant! There isn’t a right way to do it. Intention is the most important thing: and allowing yourself the freedom to be where you are.
We grow up and we grow down
Progress is wonderful - everything living wants to grow. But it doesn’t always look like the 6 figure salary or the perfect partner. We grow up and we grow down - and sometimes growth is being willing to flail around in the dark for a bit, not knowing what the hell we are doing or where we are, and feeling like everything is black, until we start to realise this is part of the process of growing roots. If you’re the type of person that gets anxious about self improvement, then this post is for you.