How do you know the difference between giving yourself a break and giving up entirely? [THREAD]
How do you know the difference between giving yourself a break and giving up entirely? [THREAD]
Looking for your shares and resources: Is there a line between self-compassion and escapism, acceptance and apathy?
Hello! Happy Sunday! I’m asking you, dear reader, for your thoughts and links.
How do you know the difference between giving yourself a break, and giving up entirely?
This past week I watched a friend’s video in which he disclosed he was stuck and in pain1. At one point he mentioned that he felt perplexed (or frustrated?) by how he was making choices that hurt him instead of making choices that might help him (when he knows better, etc.). This got me thinking a lot about my own experience these past few years, and whether sometimes the hurting is the helping, and the helping is the hurting.
Do you know what I mean?
Like how sometimes the thing we are doing that we think we shouldn’t be doing is the very exact thing we actually need at that moment, and most of the pain we’re experiencing is our own moral judgments (“I shouldn’t be doing this”; “I should be doing that”; “What I’m doing is wrong”)? Or how sometimes the pain caused by the choice we made that we deem bad or wrong, but from the gap between who we think we should be, and who we actually are?
I’m currently writing about this and I would love to get your thoughts/shares of personal experience.
How do you navigate fighting yourself to do the things you think you should? Do you rely on fear, compassion, motivation, self-loathing, etc.?
Are there “hurtful” things you "know you shouldn’t be doing” that are actually helping you in some way?
How do you navigate the perfectionism/optimization/cruel overlord mindset that can develop around healthy coping mechanisms and self-improvement/optimization?
How do you cope when you choose something that may not be the “best” choice but the one you need right now? Or vice versa?
How do you know the difference between giving yourself a break, or giving up entirely?
If you’ve got relevant resources, please share them!
My experience/more context
Most of my journal entries the last few years have had the same sentiments as my buddy in his video: “I know what to do, so why am I not doing it? Why am I doing the hurting things and not the helping things?”
A few years ago, I started to wonder if some of the hurting things were actually the helping things, and if some the helping things were the hurting things, and whether the biggest hurting thing of all was the hell I was keeping myself in by not letting myself be where I was or giving myself what i actually needed, which looked different than what I needed before.
One example: Meditation helped me enter recovery and stay there and it was one of my “non-negotiables” until 2022, when I became resistant to doing it; it was an every day agony.
Last year I hired a local meditation teacher to help me improve my practice; he listened to me talk for a short time and then said “My advice to you is to stop meditating.” Lol.
At first I was like “this man should not be a meditation teacher!” but soon after, I was so grateful to him and his permission. I stopped for a while (months and months, about a year) and it was a beautiful experience—to not make meditation my job or the thing that I have to do to have a good life/control my chaos monster shadow self/not die from addiction. It took a lot of pressure off the meditation and when I returned my “practice” (quotes bc it’s a stretch to call it a practice) was more compassionate and healthy.
It also made meditation a lot less precious and sacred. Now that I’ve taken that break I know I can have a normal and possibly great life even if I don’t meditate for 20 minutes a day every day, which is a huge bummer to know in terms of motivation.
So: I’m out of the habit of meditating, and a little indifferent/apathetic about it, and maybe even nihilistic about it (what’s the point we’re all going to die etc.) which is weird for me. I don’t think my meditating days are over (I do it a few times a week now) but it does raise this interesting tension about whether I’m giving myself a break that I need, or just fucking giving up.
This is a complex topic that touches on addiction (“hurting” things that “help” is one kind of definition of compulsive drug taking and substance/process addiction); addiction is not exactly what I’m talking about or where I’m going with this or what I’m thinking about. Looking forward to how this lands and what it makes you think.
Last week I wrote about my experience of getting cancelled and how it impacted my writing, thinking, and how I treat monsters people with different ideologies. Next week I’ll be sharing resources for those who have been ex-communicated/cancelled/publicly shamed/etc.
Subscribe △ Purchase a premium subscription △ Manage your account
Video is here; linking in footnotes because it felt a little wrong to share this video casually. It’s worth watching for many reasons (and signing up for his newsletter!), but especially because to see someone show up in the middle of the middle of the middle is a rare kind of beautiful thing—this felt humbling to watch.
I was listening to a podcast on anxiety recovery the other day and there was an episode on nervous system regulation which kind of blew my mind. Essentially they argued that our current preoccupation with being dysregulated often leads us to all these proactive and reactive interventions to prevent it, and while many of them may be considered ‘healthy’ (meditation, movement etc), when we engage in them to avoid or produce an emotional state they simply end up reinforcing a message that there’s danger in feeling that way or a problem that needs to be fixed. Which then causes us to clench and ultimately perpetuates the cycle. They argued that we might be better off accepting periods of dysregulation as a natural and normal part of being a human being. One that we mostly don’t need to do anything about, beyond putting one foot in front of the other.
As to how we know if we’re giving up or just giving ourselves a break, I also nod to my OCD recovery work. We don’t know. There’s no magic formula or feeling that’s going to guide us to the ‘right’ answer. It’s like all that BS advice that says ‘fear sounds like this, intuition feels like this.’ No it doesn’t. It’s all a punt. One we make up a story about afterwards, depending on which way it goes.
At most we have our best guesses, which hopefully get ‘better’ with age and experience but truly, who the hell knows? My goal these days is to make more choices knowing full well they could absolutely be the wrong ones.
What you describe here feels like my relationship with movement. One of my prior addictions that kept my alcohol addiction afloat was running. I was drinking daily amidst training for marathons. I told myself there is no way I could have a drinking problem b/c look at how many miles I log. No problem to see here.
Now, 4 years without alcohol and I keep trying to go back to running or a regular exercise routine and something inside gnaws at me b/c I feel like all I am doing when I go running is run away from myself. My body craves everything slow now and I am having a really hard time accepting that.
Thanks for helping me kneed that out.
Wish I had resources but all I have is my own angst 🙃