The Circle Remains Unbroken
Have you ever worked a full-time job? Maybe you’re working in one now. You commit your energy to a relationship with a given employer, trusting that employer to pay you an agreed upon wage for your time and effort. The foundation of working for other people is that if we commit time and effort to somebody else’s cause, they will pay us for that effort and time.
What happens when you start working for yourself? Potentially you put a lot of time and effort into it and make very little or no money for that time and effort. What you put into it, especially at first, doesn’t always balance with what you get of it. The foundation of a job is to be paid for our time. When we work for ourselves we have to accept the risk that it may not work out that way.
I have two very big cycles in my life that I’ve had to work on breaking. One is insecurity or lack of self-confidence. The other is money or cycles of lack. By attempting to work for myself I trigger both constantly. It’s both painful and rewarding at the same time.
To say I’ve come a long way since I started this journey is an understatement, but that doesn’t mean those cycles aren’t still back there. It doesn’t mean that those cycles don’t show up anymore. I just found them both glaring at me from a dark corner of the room I’m currently in.
I’ll be honest. I’m over it. I’ve had enough of trying to be seen on social media. I’ve had enough of making content nobody sees. I’ve had enough of “working for free”. I am tired, very tired. I am tired of being stuck in a life I don’t want. I have officially made myself miserable.
So I stopped. I stopped writing. I stopped posting, with the very rare exception. I just walked away. I went off and I played stay-at-home mom for a little bit. About 30 minutes ago, I even reached back out to my old employer seeing if they needed some help. That’s how exhausted I am. I’m tired of being tired.
But then I realized something. I was willing to work 8 hours a day for somebody else but I’m not willing to commit to my own causes for 8 hours a day. What’s that about? That doesn’t even make sense.
Insecurity and lack. My old friends, of course.
To answer your questions, yes I’m still human. Yes, those cycles are still back there. Yes, I’m still prone to them sometimes. No, I don’t catch onto everything immediately. It can still take me a hot minute to clue in. No, self-mastery is not a miracle worker. It offers me the opportunity to find things and resolve them. It doesn’t guarantee that I’ll actually be successful at it or do any of it. It just gives me the ability to do it when I’m good and ready – whenever that is.
It does give me one very powerful gift though – the ability to not beat myself up when I find this stuff hiding back there. I love the Mario Brothers video game, but I don’t need to pretend to be Mario, so I’ll reserve hammering on myself for another day.
Life just is. The cycles just are. They aren’t good. They aren’t bad. They aren’t right. They aren’t wrong. They are just there and when I catch them in the act, I catch them in the act. When I don’t catch them, I don’t catch them. It matters not how quickly or slowly I get there. In reality, it doesn’t even matter if I get there at all. It only matters that I’m trying, even when I’m tired, even when I don’t feel like it, even when I give up for a while, I’m still trying.
As the saying goes, it’s okay to not be okay.
What does all this mean?
Once I acknowledge the cycle and the pain, I have all the tools I need to fix it. I’m going to attempt to commit to my own causes for those same 8 hours a day I was just willing to give somebody else.
Am I going to be perfect at this? Not likely.
Will the cycle show up again? Yeah, probably.
Can I figure it out? Absolutely.
The ability to not beat myself up allows me to try again. I just shake my head, question why that took so long, and then move on with it.
Here’s the truth – the thing that causes you the most pain is not the cycle. It’s not the burn out. It’s not the giving up. It’s not the part where you catch yourself doing dumb sh!t. It’s the part where you beat yourself up.
Once you recognize the cycle, it’s already broken before you do anything else. The recognition of it breaks it. Now your job is to work on keeping it broken. How do you do that? By dealing with what comes up as you begin to do the things that will trigger those cycles again.
If you stop and beat yourself up for a month first, the cycle has the opportunity to put itself back in place. You get distracted so that instead of working on healing the cycle (which is the goal by the way), you instead spend your time being mad at the cycle existing at all. That keeps you stuck in the cycle. It’s a loop within a loop. You don’t fix what needs to be fixed because you’re too busy being mad at yourself for not fixing it.
If we stay out of that loop we can just move right on along. We don’t have to get stuck, at least not there. That’s one less thing to deal with.
Is it possible I’ll give up again in a week? Yep.
Is that okay? Yep.
Now that I see it, I can change it. Because I don’t beat myself up, I can keep working at it until I get it without distracting myself with what I should or not have known or done. Those things don’t matter.
Do the best you can from where you are, regardless of whether you think the best you can do sucks or not.
That’s acceptance of what is.
I’ve been beating on this horse for so long that most normal, sane people would have given up a long time ago. But, since I’m not normal or sane, I’m still here and I’m going to give this horse one more whack.
I’m going to re-group, practice a bit of self-care over the weekend, and re-focus myself on my own goals on Monday, while hopefully evicting the fear and insecurity that have been staring me down from the corner for a very long time.
Love to all.
Della
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