Put Yourself First

How I am improving my Relationship With Myself and The Positive Impact it's having.

Almost everything of note that I have achieved in my life has been driven by a healthy serving of self-loathing.

It’s terribly unhealthy and hopelessly unsustainable, but it works… albeit temporarily.

I’ve lost over 20kgs on four separate occasions in my adult life, which is excellent, but I’ve also let myself get heavily overweight four times in my adult life. Each time I lost weight, I was motivated to do so by shame and embarrassment rather than the goal of being healthier, fitter and feeling better about myself.

I had a goal of running a marathon since I was probably 15 years old, just like my dad did. I finally got my shit together, trained my arse off and ran my first marathon almost five years ago. On days when I didn’t want to train, I subconsciously thought I was motivated by the end goal. I pictured myself feeling this incredible euphoria when I crossed the finish line… it never came. All I felt was that I should’ve done it sooner. I should’ve run it quicker.

As of right now, I’m a better runner than I have ever been and recently ran some pretty significant personal bests, and still, I don’t get any great feeling from it. Might be something in that…

We spent 15 months living out of suitcases to save a house deposit. House-sitting other people’s houses, looking after their pets, watering their gardens and whatever else they’d written down on their to-do list. In between house sits, we’d drag our suitcases back to one of our parents’ houses and stay until we started the next one.

I should have been motivated to buy a house to provide us with physical safety and financial security later in life, but I wasn’t. I was motivated by my fear of what other people would think of me for not owning my own home.

I was expecting to feel some overwhelming sense of achievement after buying our first home, especially living like gypsies for 15 months to do it, yet all I felt was apathy. I should’ve bought a house sooner. I should be able to afford a bigger or newer house. I fucking loved that house, but I was still self-conscious about what others would think about me and our house.

I spent years being embarrassed about what I did for work, even though it was necessary, honest, hard work that allowed me to travel and live all over Australia doing it while earning reasonable money. I was actually happy with my work. I was ashamed and embarrassed because I feared people would think I was the stereotypical roadworker.

In more recent years, I’ve managed to get my shit together and work my way into an operations manager-style role. Still, it wasn’t financial security, a sense of achievement or purpose in my work or some burning desire to progress my career that did it. I was motivated because I wanted people to see me in a particular light, and I believed my job title would impact that.

Just like all of my school report cards read, I have always been able to achieve things when I put my mind to it. I’ve just never been able to string those periods together. I think I’ve started to realise why.

When I set my sights on a goal, I can narrow my focus and become obsessed. I do everything I can to achieve it, plus a little more. I never focused on enjoying the process. Instead, I’d be fixated on the big shiny thing I was working towards. I always felt apathetic and underwhelmed when I got to the big shiny thing. I would question if all the time and energy I put in to get there was worth it. In some instances, it was, and in others it wasn’t.

So I’d be standing there with the big shiny thing I’d worked so hard for and feel nothing more than disappointment. I’d achieved the goal, done or received the thing, and felt worse than before. It was all because I was motivated by the wrong thing all along. In some instances, I probably even had the wrong goals.

I think this is why I’ve always struggled to keep my shit together for extended periods. I would get all psyched up to achieve a goal, complete it, and feel nothing or even worse than I did before, so why would I keep going in this cycle? Whenever I put effort into doing something good, I feel worse. It’s easier to give up, not try, and idle along doing the same old shit than it is to try to figure out and understand why I am the way I am.

I think the fact that I could get it together for periods actually makes it harder to accept. It would be easier for me to accept if I was fuckin’ hopeless at everything. It’s so much worse when you know you’re capable of more. You’ve proven to yourself that you can be and do better, but you can’t seem to do it consistently. It’s like a constant reminder that you’re not even close to your potential. That you’re letting yourself and others down. It’s a heavy weight to carry. It's exhausting and unsustainable.

The good news is I’m feeling less and less like this each day, and again, I think I have figured out why.

Through regular visits to my psych, our Sobering Thoughts Community Support Group, a weekly face-to-face AA meeting and regular online AA meetings, I’m starting to feel better and better about myself. I’ve found communities of people who are similar to me. I am immersing myself in those communities; the results have been amazing. I’ve found so many amazing, like-minded people who are accepting and understanding, which has helped me realise I’m not alone in how I feel. There is nothing wrong with me; there are people out there who like me the way I am and value whatever input I have to add.

Essentially, my relationship with myself is improving because of who I am choosing to surround myself with, and I think that there is the reason why I’ve never been able to string together those periods where I’m able to get and keep my shit together until now.

I think it comes down to my view of myself at the time. When I’m low, I think I’m not worth the effort. It’s easier to grab something shiny and convenient that gives me some form of quick dopamine boost. Like all things, though, the easier it’s attained, the shorter the sense of reward.

It’s a lot like food. The shit food makes me feel good while I eat it, but shit after. The good food mightn’t give me as much of a boost while I eat it, but I feel better for a longer time afterwards.

When I was using drugs and alcohol, every time I made a poor decision, it was always motivated by how I was feeling about myself and not what was best for my long-term health. The lower my self-worth at the time, the easier it was to justify a poor decision.

I’m starting to realise that if I focus on my relationship with myself, and if I work on how I feel most of the time, rather than constantly working towards some big fucking shiny thing that doesn’t make me happy, I will make better choices organically. Incidentally, I will come to learn that I am worth the effort. That I deserve to do right by me. If I do that, I will become a better version of myself that others will benefit more from.

Maybe the key to long-term success or maintaining progress as a foundation all boils down to our relationship with or opinions of ourselves. Perhaps that’s why people can have periods where they progress but then stop and regress.

It’s all good to educate yourself on how things work and implement the relevant changes to your lifestyle, but if you reach the target you set and all your motivation has worn off, you need something else to keep going.

If you haven’t done any work on your relationship with yourself, as in the things that made you eat poorly, drink, use drugs, gamble, whatever, in time, you’ll resort back to those things or some other unhealthy outlet because although you might’ve changed your habits, have you really changed or grown as a person?

Maybe that relationship with self underpins all of it. Maybe without a healthy relationship with self, we’ll never truly be able to use our growth as a foundation to keep building on. It’s working away, trying to fill a wheelbarrow with a hole in its bottom. This stuff snowballs. We mightn’t realise it because it mightn’t be blatantly obvious, but what we did yesterday affects what we’re capable of doing today. Each choice is a building block for the next.

I think when we do right by ourselves, our selves will do right by us. When we surround ourselves with peers who make us feel good about ourselves, we will reduce our temptation to drink, use drugs, eat bad food or whatever other choices we struggle with. It’s about the place we are in when we are faced with these choices. But we have to put ourselves first to do that.

It’s hard to put yourself first. Particularly in Australian Culture, we’re conditioned by society to put others first. But are we really putting others first by showing up as a lesser version of ourselves?

I think the key is to seek what works for you relentlessly. It might take time to find it, but you can’t just accept that you’ll never find anything that works for you. There is something out there. There’s a place you belong. There’s a community that will make you feel better about yourself.

I spent over 18 months telling myself I didn’t need AA. Ultimately, I let fear of what others thought of me hold me back from pursuing something I was interested in, and I allowed it to become something in my head that was much bigger than it needed to be. I convinced myself that I didn’t need a community. I didn’t need any more support. And you know what? I was right. I didn’t need it, but fuck me, it has helped me a lot.

Is it because it’s the magical enchantment of AA? Of course, it’s fucking not. At its core, I’m just spending more time and energy connecting with people like me, making me feel good.

I’m learning I don’t actually have to do all of this hard work, all of this self-inventory on my own. I have to surround myself with people that make me feel good about myself. It will happen organically.

Achieving goals was never going to make me feel good about myself. Houses, jobs, running achievements, weight loss, none of them would ever make me feel better about myself. They would only help me cover up how I felt about myself.

All this time, I thought it was up to me to lock myself in some dark fucking corner and do some horrible kind of self-inventory where I focused on every single shitty thing about myself and figure out why I was like that or how to change it, but I don’t have to do that shit.

We’re humans. We will never rid ourselves entirely of things we don’t like about ourselves. So it’s fucking ridiculous to even try. I think the answer, for me at least, is to keep surrounding myself with people who encourage me to be and make me feel comfortable being the most authentic version of myself. The more I do that, the easier it will be for me and the better I will feel.

I wasted too much fucking time doing dumb shit that was never going to work. Don’t make the same mistake. Learn from mine. The solution lies in action, not thinking.

Go and get moving.

Cheers Wankers.

X.

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