I Am Trying to Break My Bad Habits
This is for people who truly, adamantly believe that they're too weak to improve their lives and reach for real happiness:
You tell yourself that you're not strong. You tell yourself that you're weak. I'll bet that you hold onto those stories tightly and adamantly push away anyone who tries to tell you otherwise. I'll bet that you have a very strong instinct to push away everything that I'm saying right now. It's your life. It's your story. You have the right to see it the way that you want to see it. If you want to push away what I'm saying, then you can. But the truth is that you're not weak. You want to be weak, or you wouldn't cling to the idea of your own weakness so tightly, but you're not actually weak.
The truth is that the sense of weakness that you have - the sense of powerlessness - is your greatest enemy. It's an enemy that holds you down and makes you miserable and keeps you from having what you want in your life. All of the pain that you write about in story after story is it's fault. Every time you insist that you're weak and incapable, you're actually doing the bidding of your greatest enemy - serving it and twisting up your entire life in order to do it's bidding.
The sense of powerlessness, which right now holds you down and utterly dominates your destiny, wants you to think that you're weak. It wants you to focus all of your efforts on anything but it - because it knows that you are much, much stronger than it is. It knows that if you ever recognized what it's doing to your life, stopped screaming that the lies it tells you are true, and actually started fighting against it instead of fighting for it - then its days would be numbered. It wouldn't just disappear, but it's power over you would become less and less, until one day you realized that it had become nothing more than a dull background noise that you hardly ever even notice anymore.
You tell yourself that you're not strong. You tell yourself that you're weak. I'll bet that you hold onto those stories tightly and adamantly push away anyone who tries to tell you otherwise. I'll bet that you have a very strong instinct to push away everything that I'm saying right now. It's your life. It's your story. You have the right to see it the way that you want to see it. If you want to push away what I'm saying, then you can. But the truth is that you're not weak. You want to be weak, or you wouldn't cling to the idea of your own weakness so tightly, but you're not actually weak.
The truth is that the sense of weakness that you have - the sense of powerlessness - is your greatest enemy. It's an enemy that holds you down and makes you miserable and keeps you from having what you want in your life. All of the pain that you write about in story after story is it's fault. Every time you insist that you're weak and incapable, you're actually doing the bidding of your greatest enemy - serving it and twisting up your entire life in order to do it's bidding.
The sense of powerlessness, which right now holds you down and utterly dominates your destiny, wants you to think that you're weak. It wants you to focus all of your efforts on anything but it - because it knows that you are much, much stronger than it is. It knows that if you ever recognized what it's doing to your life, stopped screaming that the lies it tells you are true, and actually started fighting against it instead of fighting for it - then its days would be numbered. It wouldn't just disappear, but it's power over you would become less and less, until one day you realized that it had become nothing more than a dull background noise that you hardly ever even notice anymore.
36-40, M
