What If You Don’t Need To Earn Being Yourself?

There is this strange feeling that comes with the realization that you have not been acting like who you want to be. Regret. Sadness. Hate. Anger. All at ourselves. And for what?

Maybe you haven't been eating “right”, or creating, or you've stopped moving your body and just settled into something smaller…. easier. You're drinking too much, sleeping more, scrolling, procrastinating, looking for distractions. Whatever it is, eventually, you see that you've stopped being yourself and you feel the need to get your life back in order.

So, you set yourself up for success. You tell yourself that tomorrow, you will wake up and be better. You will go to the gym, eat healthier, clean your house, respond to emails, finish that project, stay hydrated, schedule that doctor's appointment, get off social media and organize your life so that you can make something of yourself. You feel so motivated to be a better, more disciplined person, and you imagine yourself as someone who has already achieved all those things. You've built yourself a new identity on the back of all the undone chores, the wasted time, the failures and procrastination that you believe define you. Your fatigue is motivation.

Now it’s the next day, and if you can't gather the strength needed to fulfill all the promises you made to yourself, you’ve failed before even beginning.

I don’t know why you might do this. But I might do this because fixing myself feels easier to understand than caring for myself. Fixing has rules. It has goals. It has before pictures and after pictures. It has checklists and streaks and measurable progress. Caring for yourself is quieter, with inside work and not loud accomplishment. Caring for yourself means admitting that you are tired, doing something that accomplishes absolutely nothing, walking because the air feels good instead of because your watch is counting your steps. Sometimes it means sitting on the couch without spending the entire time mentally prosecuting yourself for sitting on the couch.

There is a huge difference between disciplining your way back to being a functional person and caring for yourself back to being alive. That might all be the difference because if you spend your life measuring your worth from what you produce, even healing and wholeness can become just another task to complete.

When you have spent enough of your life measuring your value by what you accomplish, even healing can become another assignment. You do not just want to feel better. You want to be good at feeling better. You want progress you can point to. You want proof that you are trying hard enough. So, when you have a bad day after three good ones, it feels like you ruined something. When you skip the walk, order the food, ignore the project, or spend the evening doing absolutely nothing, that old voice starts keeping score again. Look at you. Here we go again. You were doing so well.

But you were never supposed to earn your way back.

You do not need a dramatic comeback. You do not need to wake up tomorrow as the most disciplined version of yourself. Maybe the question is not, “How do I get it together?” Maybe it is, “What would make me feel a little more like myself today?” That is much easier to ask yourself because it does not knock you down for not being better, it’s just asking yourself what you need.

That is a revealing question. You might find that you do not actually miss being productive. You miss feeling strong or creative. You miss laughing and being outside. You miss feeling proud of yourself and having something to look forward to. You miss being present instead of constantly thinking about what you should be doing next. You miss yourself and you started believing the only way to find that person again was to become better.

But you are not a reward waiting at the end of your own improvement plan. You are already here.

You are still under the unfinished plans and habits you dropped. Under the weight you gained or lost. Under the messages you haven’t answered and goals you have not reached. Under the version of yourself you thought you would be by now. You are still here, and you do not have to accomplish anything to deserve being your whole self.

Growth is not always being more or doing more. Growth might be realizing when you have disappeared underneath everything you expect from yourself. Rest does not have to be earned, and joy does not need to be productive. We can find that one small choice made with care can take you further than ten choices made from haste.

You do not have to rebuild your entire life today. Find one thing that feels like you and do that. Tomorrow, find another. Don’t do it because you feel behind or because you need to make up for lost time. Don’t do it because you have finally decided to get your shit together.

Do it because you miss yourself and you are worth putting the effort in for.