I don’t know who I am. One of the characteristics of being nice for most of your life is you no longer know what you want, or like, or what you value. I’m a stranger to myself. It’s like I’m trying to guess what someone I’ve never met is in to based on a photo. I make vague guesses based on appearances and a few details about the guys past. And this is what everyone tells you to do to improve your life: write down your values. Follow your passion. Figure out what you really want in life. And my response was often, “I have no fuckin idea…. Fuck.”. I have been a stranger to myself for so long. But as I paid more attention to how I’d lived and the patterns in my life that had led to such mediocrity, I realized that instead of having no values and only fleeting wants, what I valued above all else was survival. I have been trying to avoid shame and failure as the keys to surviving. So maybe trying for one step above surviving is the key to lasting change.
When I did what the self help guys told me to do and wrote down a list of values – courage, adventure, discipline – it was empty. Pretend. Just a theoretical exercise that had no impact on what I did. I was just making shit up. It would be great to be courageous, right? So I wrote that down. But the values I listed did not influence my behavior at all. I continued to live how I had always lived. I think an exercise like listing your values is useless for anyone who has little to no idea who they really are. After many attempts at this value listing exercise I began to think that I did not have any values. (This is impossible by the way). My life was mediocre. I was a failure in most things. Whatever I did value, if anything, I valued very little. I liked very little. I wanted very little, beyond the avoidance of the shit jobs I did in order to make enough money to maintain some dignity.
I did enjoy things but I never pursued them, never made an effort to do that enjoyable activity again in order to get that good feeling. I was never focused on the fact that I really liked some activity and then put more time and effort into it. Feeling good was not a message I received. I have felt good. I’ve felt great. I’ve felt so good that all my fears and shame have disappeared and I felt like I could achieve anything. The feeling faded, as it does, and whatever I did that caused the feeling was somehow not in my control. I believed I was not in control. And more to the point, I didn’t value that good feeling highly enough. Much like I didn’t value myself. Feeling good, feeling great, was a fleeting occurrence that did not deserve my attention. The great feeling came, then passed, and I got back to dealing with what I had to. I got back to normal life.
Instead I would always return to safety, and that for the most part is doing very little, almost nothing. I would go home and be there. I would watch movies and TV. I would eat basic food. On holidays I would not go to work. My idea of enjoyment and value and want was safety and survival. It was avoiding hardship, avoiding the possibility of failure and shame. Staying safe was my highest value. I do have values and I have been honoring them. I was valuing survival.
In my unconscious list of values, safety was top of the list. Avoiding failure and avoiding shame second. And perhaps these values can fall under the concept of survival. No doubt conserving energy falls under the umbrella of survival as well. I valued survival at all cost. It cost me the usual – relationships, a career, mental health, financial freedom, intimacy, vitality. Pretty much everything. And so, for all that frustration of not knowing what I value or like, I have actually been living my values, and living them well. I’ve been very successful in satisfying my wants. I have survived and avoided many opportunities for failure and shame. If I did that self help exercise again, I would write down one value: Survival (at all cost).
I don’t know if it’s helpful to figure out why survival is so important to me. The question, “Why do I value survival so much?” is perhaps not important. If I had to guess I would say it comes from abandonment as a child. Severe abandonment in some ways. I had two parents, although my father would leave and return when I was young up until the age of around 12 when he was around constantly, unfortunately. My mother was there although she had no real motherly presence. She was like a caretaker, no real love, no connection. She was not a mother. I was also an outsider in society when I was young. I was poor in an almost totally middle class area. Race was also a factor. I was an outsider in both my home and in society. I belonged nowhere, felt safe nowhere, had no stability. Wherever I was, at home or out of it, I was surviving. I was so often scared. Being ostracized terrified me. Shaming and ridicule from others, friends, teachers and my father terrified me and was a real threat. My father would use abandonment in order to get compliance. Friends and classmates would use shame and ridicule in order to get me to remain small and inferior in order to make themselves feel large and superior. I think survival was and has become so important to me because I was in such danger as a child and felt I have been in such danger ever since. Failure and shame felt like real existential threats, and my survival strategies have been designed to protect myself from them.
Over all areas of my life, valuing survival has meant that I rarely ever take risks. Survival means not raising my head up, not getting too big, not becoming a target. Success makes you a target. I don’t ask the girl out. I don’t get good at that skill, that sport. I don’t look too good. Remaining mediocre is an excellent way to survive in this society. Remaining a boy and taking no responsibility was an excellent way to survive in my family. Risk brings failure, success brings attack. I stay away from both in practically all that I do.
Take work and earning money. I have been lower middle class as an adult. On occasion I will get close to homelessness. No job, savings spent down close to zero, then I will desperately try to find a job. And I will take whatever job I get, out of that desperation, out of that need to avoid real poverty, real destitution. I get close to failure, flirt with it, see it and sometimes I think I almost want it. I want the release true failure could give me, to have the weight off me and just go under and down and out. But I pull back from that edge, get back to some shit unskilled job, money, society, surviving.
I have no career to speak of. I hear people talking of career as if it is something we all knew we were supposed to go after. I had no idea. I have no real skills, drifted from job to job until I had enough money to stop working. Then I would stop working and just be, perhaps with some dream of learning some skill, programming for example, that might finally break the cycle and get me out. I never got past beginner or intermediate level. Money would run out. It would start all over again. A new escape plan would form and I would pursue it, develop some beginner skill, and then for whatever reason, no reason, I would give in and give it away. I would dream of the success, daydream and fantasize. Make plans and see that it was in fact possible. I could do this. I could be that guy. But I would not put in the effort. I would not sacrifice what was necessary. I held myself back. I continued to survive.
I avoid relationships, especially with women that seem to genuinely like me.
I make friends but do not maintain them. I let people fall away.
I will go in and out of hobbies, but these too I let fall away.
I do very little, watching YouTube and TV. My activities in my free time are essentially not working.
I don’t want to go in on every aspect of my life. Suffice to say I avoid the shame of failure and I avoid the dangers of success. I stay mediocre as much as possible, in conscious but mostly unconscious ways. I sabotage myself if I get too close to something good. And that way I survive - anxious, depressed, scared, and often angry, but surviving. Eking out a living as a half invisible, unhappy little boy.
So if survival is my highest value, naturally I want to find a counter-value, and the opposite sounds like it would be the go, right? What comes to my mind is probably what comes to yours – thrive. Stop surviving and start thriving! Is something I’ve heard, although I don’t know who says it or said it. Sounds pretty feminine to me, but okay. Maybe what I need to do is priortise thriving. Turn it all around and start doing the opposite.
I couldn’t thrive even if I fuckin wanted to. When I hear the word ‘thriving’ I imagine someone with a shit load of energy. Smiling. A woman. Looking up with eyes wide open, no doubt or fear, and with a clarity of purpose that would make me hate myself just being around them. I don’t think I get to thrive just yet. That is so far from me it’s laughable. I don’t think I get to skip ahead and go straight to the finish line.
I want something I can work with, something achievable. Not the opposite of survival but instead one step up the ladder of self actualization. Just as anger is better than despair, but isn’t great and to be held onto, I am after something equally better but temporary. A value doesn’t have to be forever. It is not the final decision locking me into a set of behaviors for the rest of my life. It just has to get me out of the hole I’m in and improve my life.
I am not in very much danger anymore. I have a decent job. I have money. I can leave where I am and go somewhere new. I can reject the people that are around me and I can handle being alone. I can even handle being disliked to an extent, and that is growing.
I’m thinking about the values of security or stability. Perhaps well being. Sufficient. Satisfied. A lot of S words for some reason. The idea is to have enough of the basics. To now make those areas of life that have caused me shame and desperation good enough. Not necessarily great, just so I am not ashamed. I can imagine a life where I am not wealthy but I have enough money and I feel good about the money I am earning and the possibility of earning more. I have relationships and intimacy, perhaps not love or passion but I feel good about friends and relationships. I’m doing some work I find tolerable, work that does not make me sick the night before. I could go on.
Basically it comes down to identifying where I feel shame and failure in my life. Why I feel that way. And working on getting to good enough, to something secure and sufficient. This doesn’t sound all that motivational. There is no grand life to be had, no applause and awe in this process. It is a simple life where I feel I have a little more than I have ever had before, and I appreciate that, and while it is not all that I hoped for, it is sufficient when I look at myself with some humility and maturity. And within that stable sufficiency, progress and the possibility for more.
I’ll give you an example.
One thing I have noticed is that I always feel better when I have a lot of food at home. I was often hungry growing up. There was a lack of food. I now have a stockpile of non-perishable food that I have built up and that sit in big plastic containers. I call it ‘The Store’. Cans of tuna, cooking oil, tea, coffee, jerky and so on. I feel good having this storehouse in my possession. I feel secure, although I haven’t thought of it that way in the past. I like the security and the feeling of abundance. I like to finish a bottle of oil and go to The Store and pull out another one and see that there are five more still there. It makes me feel good. I enjoy building up the stock.
I have done this ‘stocking up’ haphazardly over the past two or three years. I wait until something I use and will keep is half price or heavily discounted and I get a bunch of them. I know that I can do this prepping, or stock piling, more intelligently and that if I did, I would enjoy it, and I would feel good about it. In other words, I would feel more secure, even abundant, if I locked in this habit and really built it out with some thought and planning.
I could go through a list of life areas here and figure out what would represent ‘Security’ for me. I will do this, just not here. The point is, there does exist a sense of security in the various areas of my life, and although for some areas it might be vague at first, with some effort I can achieve clarity pretty quick. Often what I need to feel successful is quite difficult to achieve, such as intimacy and career. But what is sufficient is within reach. What I want in my career or finance, and what I have in the past many times written down as my goal for these areas, is not what would make me feel secure. It is instead the big goal, the dream, and although I have trouble knowing how I feel about such a goal, I suspect it caused anxiety and fear.
I can ask myself, what is secure and sufficient for me in:
health
finance
career
home
hobbies
friends
adventure
environment
social life
intimacy
basic necessities
work relations
I can look at past actions that have improved my life in that area in some small way. I can find those low hanging fruit, those simple and easy actions that would make me feel good and reduce my shame. The obvious stuff at times, the kind of things most people do as standard and that I’ve neglected for whatever reason. Set my living room up so it’s comfortable and looks good. Plan a cheap trip each month. Make an investment habit for each payday. Nothing too difficult. Nothing that seeks to change everything. Small. Good enough. Actions that value what is sufficient and good enough.
I have not known who I am. I have ignored what I like or enjoy or value. What I have pursued in life is safety, passivity, all motivated by the desire to avoid failure and shame. I often thought I never had any values. I do in fact have a value that I have pursued successfully, with enormous effort and self sacrifice. My highest value has always been survival. Having survival as my highest value has cost me a life that I enjoy. I cannot feel the idea of thriving, and so instead what I will pursue for now is sufficiency, the good enough. I can look into areas of my life where I feel shame and where there is emptiness and lack and I can identify what would be good enough. This small step, I believe, will lead to the kind of transformation I have desperately sought my entire life.