The past few years have given me plenty of time to reflect. No surprise there, considering my circumstances. But it’s revealed some hard truths that I’m having trouble reconciling. For a while now I feel like I’ve had a good understanding of who I am as a person. I’m the first person to admit that for most of my life I was severely lacking in the self-awareness department. But that changed once I started therapy. So much so that I feel like I was able to turn one of my greatest weaknesses into one of my greatest strengths. 

It seemed pretty cut and dry, so wasn’t something I questioned much… Until now. I’ve always been someone who spends a lot of time alone. As you would imagine for someone who’s as introverted as I am, much of the day is spent inside my head. Like many things in life, it’s a double-edged sword. When I lacked self-awareness and confidence it was a dark and dangerous place to reside. Negative thoughts circulated through my head without any sort of constructive release, which only made the rough moments even rougher. I was hard on myself and didn’t show myself any grace or give myself credit (I still don’t do enough of either, if I’m being honest). There was a lot of moping around and feeling sorry for myself. You know the story, I’ve been over it a number of times.

Therapy taught me how to use the time spent thinking in more productive ways. Which was extremely important. It would’ve been unreasonable to expect that I’d be able to stop myself from thinking so much, so best then to reframe my mindset instead. Rather than brooding and sulking, I began reflecting. This helped me develop the self-awareness that I had so severely lacked. Which in turn, allowed me to methodically evaluate each scenario and come up with a plan on how to move forward and improve. I believe that the self-awareness that I gained from that helped kickstart my mental health journey. 

This coupled with therapy allowed me to finally process past events in my life. Helped me let go of various traumas I was holding onto and move on from them. I was able to revisit past experiences and learn the lessons I was supposed to learn. Which surprised me at first—you wouldn’t think there’d be anything left to learn from something that had happened years or decades prior. But that’s not really true. If you keep ignoring your problems or keep running from adversity you’re only delaying the inevitable. There is only one realistic outcome for you with this approach: you doom yourself to repeating past mistakes and you give your issues room to fester and get worse. Until you learn your lesson, nothing is going to truly change or get better. So, at some point you will have to deal with the adversity head-on. It’ll hurt in the short-term, but you’ll be better off in the end. 

Unfortunately, for most of us, dealing with adversity directly is the harder thing to do. It’s actually relatively easy to take the “out of sight, out of mind” approach. It’s easy to pretend like things aren’t as bad as they are. It’s easy to lie to ourselves. To delude ourselves into believing that our issues aren’t so bad or don’t actually exist. It’s easy to just ignore everything that you don’t want to deal with. It might give us short-term relief, but these things will always come back to haunt us eventually—ignoring them didn’t magically make them disappear. So, the longer you delay, the more you’ll have to unpack. But instead of being able to deal with each small issue separately, in bite-sized pieces, it might hit you all at once like a ton of bricks. Not a fun time, to say the least. But there’s no one to blame but yourself. You have to live with the consequences of your actions (or inactions). Pointing the finger at others won’t do you any good. It might feel satisfying in the moment, but until there’s meaningful change within yourself there isn’t going to be any tangible progress or improvement. 

One sign of maturity is learning how to hold yourself accountable. It starts with owning up to your mistakes and having the awareness and humility to admit when you’re wrong. When I was a youngster I was a rather naughty kid. I wasn’t a bad egg per se, but my curiosity often got the better of me, and I liked testing boundaries and limits. On top of that, I wasn’t particularly sneaky nor was I a good liar. No surprise then that I often got caught. But more often than not, instead of owning up to it when my mom questioned me, I would either lie about it or feign ignorance. The last thing I wanted to do was take accountability. The most common phrases that came out of my mouth were, “I didn’t do it,” or “It was an accident.” She never believed me—and for good reason—so I always ended up with a worse punishment than if I had just told the truth. But did I learn my lesson? No I did not. The pattern repeated over and over and over again. It didn’t end until I was ten- or eleven-years-old when I decided to leave my naughty phase behind me once and for all. When I finally got tired of getting spanked. 

That was the first time in my life that I said, “enough is enough.” The first time I tried to make a conscious effort to change my behavior. And it worked for a while, but looking back on it now, I don’t think I had the right takeaway from all this. My motivation in doing this wasn’t centered around doing the right thing per se, but rather on avoiding punishment. The end result may have been the same, but the thought process was very different. Obviously, I was too young to understand the nuance, so this much only became clear to me in hindsight. If I had known the difference, would I have handled things differently? Maybe, maybe not. It’s not the most productive use of my time to speculate on this type of hypothetical situation. All I know is that this approach worked at first, and let me move onto the next phase of my life. It wasn’t until much later that maintaining this approach started to become a detriment. 

Either way, I didn’t learn how to truly hold myself accountable until much much later. My teenage years were filled with a lot of blame shifting, pity parties, and general anger at the world. I just didn’t have the awareness, willpower, or confidence to drill down to the root and find legitimate solutions for my issues. It was easier to play the victim than it was to be critical of myself or my behavior. This young version of me did not have the mental fortitude that I have now. I wasn’t a problem solver back then. I gave up too easily, and I kicked myself when I was down. I was already in a bad enough place psychologically that I probably wouldn’t have been able to handle any amount of self-evaluation even if I knew how to do it. No surprise then that all of this stunted my development. But I didn’t know any better. You live and you learn. 

Everything changed once I developed even an ounce of self-awareness. Obviously, therapy helped with that. But it’s not a magic cure-all. Whether you meet weekly or bi-weekly, there is still plenty of work that needs to be done on your own. Your therapist won’t be there to hold your hand throughout the week. They can’t help you if you’re not willing to help yourself. At first, you may not have the tools necessary to do this on your own. They will develop over time. But you have to use them regularly to keep them sharp. All of this is done with your mental health in mind. Nothing is impossible as long as your mind is healthy. The going is much rougher when it’s not. Again, this is where having some self-awareness will come in handy. 

Things will get better from there. You just need to have faith, self-belief, and determination. Developing self-awareness should lead you down a natural progression in your mental health journey. And I guarantee you’ll learn plenty of things about yourself along the way. You’re stronger than you think you are. Not as broken. You’re more skilled and capable than you think you are. Not as helpless. You’re more knowledgable than you think you are. Not as inept. Once you learn how to show yourself grace, start cutting yourself some slack, you’ll quickly see how much you’ve grown and matured. You’ve become more put together than you even realized. It might feel sudden, but it didn’t happen overnight. 

Your experiences change and mold you whether or not you make a conscious effort to do so. I think deep down your mind, body, and soul know what you need, and will guide you in the right direction. I guess that’s what intuition and human instinct are. The seeds are there, we just need to grow and develop them. We need to learn how to listen to our inner voice—it’s wiser than we give it credit for. And that’s where reflection comes in. Once you become more self-aware, once you learn how to be accountable, once you humble yourself, you’ll be able to evaluate yourself in a more objective way. You want to be hopeful but you also have to be realistic. In order to do that you have to be honest with yourself and know where you stand. If your opinion of yourself is too low you’re at risk of undervaluing your worth, not giving yourself the credit you deserve. This can have dire consequences for your self-confidence. If you’re too high on yourself you risk setting yourself up for disappointment, because there’s a higher chance of you setting unreasonable and/or unreachable expectations (amongst other things). It’s imperative then that you try to find a middle ground. 

Spending time reflecting will help with that. You’ll become more in tune with who you are. You’ll have a better understanding of what you need. And it’ll show you a clearer picture of how you fit in with society. Which all connects back to the self-awareness thing. Ultimately, all of this ends up being a great way of holding yourself accountable—a desirable trait. Generally, we want others to think of us as having high moral character. What this consists of varies based on who you ask, but for the most part we tend to gravitate towards people that are dependable, loyal, and kind. We like people that have integrity, are honest, and are respectful. Some of these traits are already ingrained in us. Maybe they were a natural part of our core personality. Maybe they were taught to us by our parents or our teachers. Maybe they came about due to some other reason. But even if you possess some or all of these traits it doesn’t mean you can’t keep improving in that area. If you’re a kind person you can be even kinder. If you’re honest you can be more honest. If you’re dependable you can be more dependable. 

There is no upper limit. That means that self-improvement is a never-ending climb. But that’s what we do it for, isn’t it? We’re trying to be the best version of ourselves each and every day. It sounds daunting but it’s rewarding seeing how much you’ve grown since the last week/month/year. Every so often you’ll want to stop and smell the roses. You’ll want to enjoy the view during your climb. But at some point you have to continue on your journey—there’s so much more for you to see. And I think maybe we lose sight of that. We bask in the glory so much that we forget what we’re doing it for. I sure as hell have forgotten. When I started writing it was because I had stories I wanted to tell, insight I wanted to give. I wanted to help people the best way I knew how—through my writing. But in order to do that I needed to make incremental improvements both in my craft and in my psyche. I needed to work towards becoming a better human day by day. At some point, I forgot to do that. 

At some point I started smelling myself so much that I forgot how much farther along I needed to go. I forgot that there was still so much that I didn’t know and so much more for me to learn. I forgot that there was still so much more room for growth. I saw the improvements that I had made in my writing and I thought that that was enough. But it wasn’t. Yes it filled me with confidence, and justifiably so. But the improvements I had made were only in one area of my life. I had hyper-focused on one domain to the detriment of other domains. Becoming a better writer didn’t help me become a better human, friend, son, boyfriend, etc. It didn’t make me a more qualified job candidate. It didn’t make me a better worker. It didn’t help me earn an income. Writing was and is a hobby that brings me joy, fulfillment, and satisfaction. But it’s nothing more, nothing less. I wish I would’ve realized this sooner. 

That way I wouldn’t have set everything aside to pursue a dream that’s not yet realistically attainable. Yes I still believe that I have the skill and talent to get to where I want to go—that self-belief does not waver. But at the end of the day, whether or not I get published isn’t totally within my control. I might be good enough, but I might not be lucky enough to get my big break. That’s just the reality of things. The odds are not in my favor. Intellectually, that’s something I’ve always known. But it wasn’t something that I wanted to accept. Instead, I had let my ego get the better of me. Confidence in one thing ballooned into confidence in all things. I took a concept that was nuanced and I made it black and white. 

What was meant to be two pursuits I had made into one—it was always supposed to be pursuit of a hobby and pursuit of a career. What was meant to be my side job I had made into my main one. What was meant to be my main one ended up being tossed aside. While I valued and appreciated the time off at first, it’s gone on for far too long. Whether or not I wanted to admit it, this was never going to be sustainable. If the goal of this sabbatical was to give me time to finish writing a book then I’ve failed miserably. If the goal was to give me space to raise the quality of my writing to an acceptable level then I accomplished that a long time ago. Either way, it’s run its course. I’m ready for my sabbatical to end, although I didn’t see it as a sabbatical at first. 

My one regret is that I did not react quicker. I refused to budge from the path that I had taken. I refused to open my eyes to my delusions. I should’ve started looking for a job a long time ago. Having a steady income would’ve better helped me navigate the ups and downs of my writing journey. I would’ve had something to fall back on if things didn’t go my way. I would’ve had a more solid foundation to build my confidence upon rather than depending on the ebbs and flows of my writing. But I’ve always been rigid and hard-headed. Even when I pivot I often pivot too late. If only reflection had shown me this. But the truth of the matter is, I wasn’t honest with myself. I wasn’t honest with my expectations. So reflection could only reveal so much… And now it feels late. It’s not too late, but it’s still late. Better late than never I guess.