The point is that not all of your thoughts that are negative are unhealthy. Sometimes the world is ugly and bad things happen, it’s an integral part of the way we all live. It’s happened before, and it’s bound to happen again to you and to everyone. Not every day you have is good, but don’t let that deter you from trying to find the bad in it either. There are good things and good people in everything we are, in everything we do. It’s how the world works. You can be sad—you can have bad days and the people who love you will help you through it. You can have those moments of anger and of intense sadness. You can mourn and scream or jump with joy, but understand that you can’t have one without the other, and learn how to have both in your life. If you can learn how to implement that balance, you’ll have a more fulfilled life, both the good and the bad.
Chapter 10
The Closing Act
You’ve come so far to read this entire thing. It’s a marvel how determined you have to be to be so committed to fixing your thinking and becoming a happier person. First and foremost, I hope you can bring yourself to congratulate yourself. Pat yourself on the back, lean back and be proud, however, you see fit—the most important thing about kicking a habit of unhealthy thinking is that it doesn’t come to those who ask for the help of only others without doing much themselves. The only way that you accomplish a more complete and fulfilled life is if you can reach out your hand and do it yourself. You have to be the one to take the grand first step toward healing and getting better, and that’s just what you’re doing. That’s a really admirable thing to do, so I hope deeply that you can be proud of yourself for taking a step forward.
That’s another really prevalent method of slowly chipping away at your habits of self-deprecation—think good things, even about the smallest of things. No matter how small you may think it is, no matter how irrelevant you may think something you’ve done is, congratulate yourself for doing it and doing it well. We so often take this kind of thing completely for granted, really. We so often disregard the things we do during our morning or evening routines. When we get so caught up on the things we do wrong, we often find it difficult to recognize and register the things we do right every single day. When this happens, just take a moment to step back. Strangely, temporary detachment can be a good idea, although with periods of that detachment few and far between, if your negative thinking is particularly unhealthy or damaging. Take a step back and just understand that the things you do right far outweigh the things you do wrong. Even those things you still do wrong, you’ll learn. That’s another thing that’s crazy about humans—we learn things. And more often than not, we learn things really, really quickly. It’s a strange thing, but we get so caught up on what we can’t do just yet that we somehow lose the ability to tell what we can do now when we start something new. Some people say that this way of sorting out what we can and can’t do, and focusing on the “can’t” category, is heavily due to our evolution. If you were an animal who was only focused on surviving, you would focus on what you have yet to learn to improve your abilities instead of what you already know. Except - in this case, you aren’t in a position where you have to focus on that kind of thing. Additionally, somehow, somewhere along the way we forgot how to focus on our flaws and the things we haven’t mastered quite yet in a constructive way that helps us to learn faster. Instead, we started learning how to look at our flaws and those unknown skills not with constructive criticism, but with a destructive eye instead. Now, some of us can’t help but look at a list of things that we simply can’t do, and we feel like we want to cry. No matter what kind of environment you grew up in, if you’re reading this book and relating to at least some of the things you’ve seen, you’re probably someone who, as a child, had a lot of pressure on them. That pressure hurts, and I’m sorry. The pressure of wanting so badly to surprise your parents or your parents with your good grades, feeling upset with yourself when you don’t live up their expectations, the sting you feel late that night in bed, thinking about all of the ways you could have easily done just a little bit better. If you had just studied a little bit harder; a little bit more often if you had just paid a little more attention in class the day before. The sting of feeling like you’ve disappointed the people you care about and want to be proud of you the most is terrible. To live with the guilt of what you feel is making those people, those role models, disappointed in you, is something that I would never wish upon anyone because I also understand the feeling accurately, I like to think. If you’re reading this, maybe you never got over that guilt of letting your parents and teachers down, so you kept trying. You kept trying, and you obsessed over trying to satisfy them for years and years. Maybe, as you grew older, their expectations grew, and you were forced to grow up with them, faster and faster. Maybe, you lost a little bit of your childhood to that obsession, and now a little bit of your adult like to that obsession. It hurts to feel like no matter what you do, you’re destined to disappoint them. I understand that pain.
Please know that, now, no matter what happens, there will always be people who are proud of you. Above all else, you should be proud of yourself. You’ve come so far and done so much for yourself for so long, struggling and fighting tooth and nail just to keep up with your peers. On one hand, that’s why you’ve accomplished what you have. In a macabre way, that obsession has helped you to grow up to be accomplished and acclimated to stressful environments. On the other hand, doing just that and tempering your competitive spirit has not only engaged your intelligence and made you able to handle dealing with stress, pressure, and the standards of others, but it has also done the opposite in the process. While it did help you be more competitive, it also dragged you down once you no longer had to be competitive. When there were no longer any more standards for you to have to meet in school or at home, you were left with that obsessive nature that drove you to do well always and to disregard everything you had already accomplished. But, you had to make your own harsh standards. It was hard, but I hope that you can take a step back and understand just how far you’ve come on your journey. You’ve come so incredibly far, after all. Love yourself.
Master Your Thinking Page 7