Yesterday morning I woke up, plagued by intrusive thoughts and self-doubt.
I had slept fitfully, waking in the middle of the night, tossing and turning for hours as I replayed interactions I had at work while also concocting new and uncomfortable conversations I’d yet to have in my mind. Was there a tenseness in the air today? Did that one person’s laugh seem forced?
Despite knowing I had no control over what was going to happen with my freelance work, and knowing I should stop feeding into the self-doubt that was keeping me awake, I couldn’t stop. I tried my best to focus on my breathing and clear my mind so I could fall back asleep. My alarm would be going off in a few hours and I knew that crappy sleep was definitely not going to help with job performance the next day, especially if I was already feeling suddenly insecure about the trajectory of my work life.
I did eventually fall asleep, but when I woke, I was still saturated with a sense of unease.
Even on my morning walk, I was so zoned out and bogged down by my self-doubty shit that I was unable to shake, that I somehow missed the turn to head back towards home.
This is a neighborhood I’ve lived in for 12 years, and a walk I’ve been doing almost every day for over a month. And yet my mind, so consumed by anxiety and skepticism, followed by my own judgement about having the anxiety about my insecurity, rattled me enough to disorient me in my own neighborhood.
I eventually arrived back home and I turned on my Activations app, my ‘woowoo’ motivational tool I’ve been using for months. And I listened to activation after activation. On my drive to work, I turned on a podcast about overcoming self-doubt. At lunch, I wrote for a bit, putting fingers to keys, outlining what I was feeling, and my feelings about my feelings, trying to purge the nastiness from my body.
Any time I began to feel suspicious or unsure throughout the rest of the day, I took a moment to sweep those ideas away. I would take a deep breath and remind myself that being present and doing my best was the best thing that I could do in the moment.
Everything else was out of my control, and being subsumed in my own feelings would be counterproductive.
This morning, I woke up feeling great. I feel capable again, feeling like anything is possible. Yet 24 hours ago, the feelings I have now of being limitless, sounded impossibly far away, so hokey and completely out of reach. But I did everything I could to drown out those thoughts, turning on a podcast and hearing about other people’s stories about overcoming their own self-doubt, listening to my app that reminded me over and over that I am worthy and that I have something to offer the world, and sharing, if even just with my computer, the illogical but very real feelings I was having about my state of mind.
I wasn’t sure if it was working, but waking up this morning with a rejuvenated sense of self is enough proof to me that my little tactics had an impact.
The mind is powerful. It can do so much good, but it also has the power to keep us from everything that we want. My experience in the last day has been an incredible reminder of just how fast we can turn ourselves around. Maybe 24 hours doesn’t sound that fast, and moods can definitely be flipped far quicker than that for sure, but I was having a rather nefarious bout of doubt about my self-worth and the level of quality that I bring to the world that needed a bit more work than usual.
I will never be cured of my self-doubt, and that’s ok.
I honestly would have a great distrust of anyone that never had any self-doubt as they might be a sociopath. But I am thankful that I had an arsenal of tools to throw at my flailing ego, and that I managed to bounce back as fast as I did. It’s not always going to be that fast, but awareness is the first step, and I’m grateful that I recognized the steps I needed to take immediately instead of sinking into believing my fears, giving them teeth as they nestled deeper into my brain and body.
Sometimes we gotta fake it till we make it. Countless research studies show that saying things out loud helps make them happen. Many a morning I have stood in my kitchen, hands on my hips in my power stance, and declared loudly to no one, ‘TODAY IS GONNA BE A GREAT DAY!’, because the day before ended with me crying on a curb because the day had gone so terribly.
And you know what? Those days did end up being great days. Because I gave them a fighting chance to be, instead of going in thinking ‘Well this is so fucked already and will continue to be fucked!’ I’m not saying this will always work, and I’m certainly not saying that every day will or should be a great day.
I’m just saying that we have far more control over how things go, or at least how we perceive them to go, than we realize.
It’s important to remember that just as impactful as positive thoughts and feelings can be, negative thoughts and feelings are equally, if not more damaging to oneself. As I replayed interactions in my head, I gave them more weight, more severity. Manufacturing negative conversations in my head was doing me no favors, even though in the moment I felt like I was getting myself ready so I could be best prepared for every kind of rejection that might be coming.
As someone with anxiety, thinking about the worst case scenario and preparing for it has always been something I thought was one of my superpowers.
I wore it like a badge of honor, believing I was protecting myself and others from the unforeseeable catastrophes that lay in wait.
I would be lying if I said my anxiety hasn’t been helpful at times- it has certainly served me by way of having a First Aid kit on me most of the time or having purchased insurance on a heating blanket when it inevitably craps out from overuse. However, the mental rehearsal of rejection or ‘failure’ is doing far more harm than good, and in hindsight has done nothing but prevent me from pursuing interests that might have otherwise fulfilled me.
Drown the doubt. Try to replace thoughts of self-doubt with the positive flip side.
A couple months ago I made myself write down some of my biggest fears about publishing my writing online because I was terrified to do so.
‘What if people think it’s stupid?’ I wrote. And then I followed it up with the counter thought: What if someone thinks its great?
Then I began to sob, because I realized that my fear of people finding no value in what I write doesn’t actually matter and was far outweighed by the idea that if even one person got something out of my writing that that was a win. No one is paying to read my stuff, and I’m not forcing anyone to read it. If someone doesn’t like it, they can just stop reading.
When I zoom out and realize that I’ve been moving through life harboring my own disappointments by not going for something I want out of sheer fear of being judged by a stranger, I am beside myself. It’s beyond upsetting, and though I cannot take that time back, all I can do is carry this with me and remind myself every single time I doubt myself and don’t feel worthy to take up space, that I can, and I should.
I often have to remind myself, out loud, ‘No one cares!’, and not in a way that is supposed to make me feel bad, but as comfort that as long as I am not hurting or disrespecting anyone else, that I can do, say, write whatever I damn well please. Everyone else is honestly too wrapped up in their own shit, afraid of people judging them, that no one is really taking time to pay attention to anything I’m doing and least of all, to expend any amount of time or energy judging the things I spend time doing.
And what if they are judging you? Well, fuck them. Because it doesn’t matter.
If people are going to be judgey, they are gonna be judgey whether you do what you want or not, so you might as well do what you want to do. Because their judgement says more about them than it does about you. Talking shit about something you’re doing is just deflection from them not doing what they want to be doing.
Don’t let other people dim your light, and absolutely don’t be the one keeping you from turning it on in the first place. We can so easily become prisoners of our own minds, convincing ourselves that our ideas and dreams are stupid and not worth chasing. You’ll get enough pushback from people who are fearful of taking their own chances when you start to go for your dreams, so give yourself and your ambitions a chance and say them out loud, give them life, and cheer yourself on.
Don’t doubt yourself out of your destiny- you have something unique to offer and it’s frankly unfair to keep it hidden from the world!
