being more available to myself requires me to be less available to others

& other patterns i am trying to notice and break within myself

art by @haranikala

One thing that has been interesting about working for myself is that many of the patterns and unconscious parts of myself that were reasonably contained by systems I was in (i.e. work, school, athletics) are no longer contained in the path I have chosen. This path is as close to complete freedom as it gets, where I manage my life, time, world and become both the employer, employee, manager, creator, marketer, etc. The result of this is that I am having to entertain and face parts of myself that until this point, I have managed to avoid “dealing with” head on. The biggest one among these has been what I would call the shadow side of my hyper-sensitivity to others.

facing my shadow

I intend to write about this in more depth at some point, but at a high level, I will just say that I am incredibly sensitive to the emotions of others. So much so that I will often unconsciously prioritize others’ feelings over my own needs, desires, and priorities — in part, because it is incredibly painful for me to feel the emotions of others without actively trying to soothe or diffuse them. Until recently, this tendency has been able to squeak by me fairly unnoticed, unregulated, persisting through my life with ease. I will drop what I am doing to tend to an unmet need of someone else, or to soothe them emotionally. When I see someone hurting or wanting my attention, I want to give it to them. I know that I can probably make them feel better, and save them from having to deal with that emotion themselves. In the long-term though, this is unsustainable for both of us. For me, because it is difficult to make clear, consistent progress in my own world when I am more attuned to what others are feeling than what I need from myself. And for them, because learning to digest and metabolize your own emotions is a vital skill for overall well-being, and doing that for someone robs them of their ability to properly develop it.

This pattern has been fairly un-intrusive to my life until recently. When I was in systems that demanded my attention (i.e. a workplace), it was easy to have some default boundaries around my attention and time. I had to answer to someone. It was eas(ier) to turn away from the call of my sensitivity yanking me towards someone. But now, I am being forced to actually face this feature of myself and decide: is this really something I want to keep doing for the rest of my life? I am being forced to notice it, because I have chosen a path where I am in control of my time, attention and resources, and with that, comes a responsibility to manage myself more adamantly and carefully than I needed to when I was also being managed by someone else.

This is, I think, why being a creative or an entrepreneurial person is one of the steepest paths to self-actualization. To succeed at what you are doing, you HAVE to manage yourself wisely (and thus face and break patterns that no longer serve you) to make the path work. Your ability to thrive is dependent on your ability to make what is unconscious about you, conscious, and then integrate that self-knowledge to serve your mission.

This is why it is so interesting to manage yourself: your path to “excellence” for the first time maybe in your entire life is about understanding yourself and setting up the optimal rules, structures, and dynamics in your life that are best suited to your nature, instead of forcing yourself into a generic set of rules created to house the mean (average person) at the cost of preserving (or at least expressing) your uniqueness. This is also what makes it challenging: you are forced to face all of the parts of yourself that you haven’t looked at because you haven’t had to look at them. Because your life allowed you to proceed with those parts unexamined, intact, operating in the background without your awareness.

I want a life where work feels like merely existing. But to get there, I am required to face the parts of myself that keep work from flowing effortlessly. The parts of myself that are getting in the way, that are stale, persistent vestiges of my past self that will not disappear until I consciously shed them.

I am enjoying solving this puzzle of understanding myself through my work—in part, because I believe that enjoying your ‘problems’ (the things you have not figured out yet) is the only way to actually enjoy life. Because you will ALWAYS have problems. The key is to choose problems you would actually enjoy solving.

It is also humbling to see things about yourself that no longer belong and will block your progress until you augment them intentionally. These inconvenient parts of yourself don’t just disappear because you have noticed them once! They require fairly constant attention, until your nature shifts so that they no longer have gravity for you. Until the pattern is broken in the moment it attempts to arise. Until you learn to pause and make a different choice, even though there are deep grooves within yourself that want you to keep doing what you have always done.

Self-awareness requires attention and reflection, but transforming yourself requires vigilance. If you want to change the way you show up in the world, you need to change the way you respond to the world. You need to change the way you see yourself, and then you need to be honest with yourself when you do not show up in ways that feel aligned. It’s a bit of a process to sort all of this out in the midst of living your life, answering to the world’s demands of you, and trying to be a good person, managing your priorities and honouring your needs as you go. But that is the reality (and the blessing!) of being human: to solve the problem set that is being yourself in the world.

From where I am sitting, I am pretty sure the best way to live a Good Life is to make choices that will give you fun problems to solve, and that will leave you with a version of yourself that feels more alive, expressive and aligned once you’ve solved them. That way, you aren’t aiming at an unrealistic ideal (a life with no problems), but the most optimal version of reality (a set of problems you can have fun solving, and that you are uniquely well suited to solve). At least, that is how I try to live my life. It brings me as close as possible to what I imagine an effortless life can feel like: where you are doing what you want to be doing, and the parts of yourself that you need to transcend to do so are parts of yourself that no longer belong with you anyway. Perhaps you may enjoy approaching life this way, too :)

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Work with me 1-1: I help people discover what they truly want and align their actions with their values to cultivate a life that feels true to them. This unfolds through a guided process of conversation, introspection and conscious action. Learn more about working with me here.

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Related essays you might enjoy: becoming yourself is a process of reduction, ambition as a fingerprint, approaching life with ease. You can also find me on Twitter.

Is there anything you have been noticing and trying to transcend within yourself lately?