1️⃣ “Things could be so much better”
2⃣ “Things could be so much worse”
These are both true statements, but there's an asymmetry between them.
Improvement is a tightrope; ruin is the whole canyon.
At any given moment there are only a handful of ways to make life better, but an infinite number of ways to shatter it...
yet we sit and mope about the fraying thread of the tightrope instead of thanking gravity, and God, we’re not in free-fall.
@benroy Hell yeah Ben. Stoked to try this! (If this sync would ever finish! Have you experienced with long—30min—delays with that? My first time trying and not sure if it's normal.)
It’s not that hard to change bro, you just need to figure out your fear of success which means you’re unconsciously terrified of surpassing your parents and becoming unrecognizable to your family system so you stay small to maintain belonging, and your fear of failure which means public judgment would confirm what you secretly believe about yourself, and your fear of exposure because if people saw the real you they’d discover you’ve been faking competence this whole time, and the secondary gain you’re getting from suffering because pain gives you an identity and an excuse structure and honestly gets you more attention than health would, and your unconscious loyalty to your family system because nobody in your lineage ever made it so who are you to break the pattern, and your repetition compulsion where you keep recreating the exact same painful dynamic because your nervous system literally doesn’t know how to process anything else, and your unresolved grief that’s sitting in your chest like a stone because you never actually let yourself feel it so it just runs in the background corrupting everything, and your shame which isn’t something you feel but something you ARE at the core identity level, and your learned helplessness from that time you tried and it didn’t work so now your brain has generalized that trying equals futility, and your toxic guilt about wanting more because somewhere you learned that ambition is selfish and wanting things takes them from others, and your unmetabolized trauma that’s literally stored in your tissues and shows up as a freeze response every time you approach the thing, and your attachment wounds from childhood which means you either cling until you suffocate people or disappear before they can leave you first, and your internal parts conflict because your protector parts are trying to keep your exiled parts safe while your firefighter parts burn everything down the moment you get close to success, and your shadow material aka all the parts of yourself you’ve disowned that are now running your life from backstage, and your ego protection because growth requires the death of who you currently are and your ego is correctly identifying that as a threat, and your internalized critical parent who’s still running commentary on everything you do decades later, and your narcissistic injury avoidance because testing your potential against reality might reveal you’re not as special as the fantasy requires, and your perfectionism which isn’t high standards but a control mechanism that lets you say “I never really tried” forever, and your analysis paralysis which is just intellectualization dressed up as rigor, and your counterdependency where you refuse help because you’ve confused isolation with strength, and your passive aggression turned inward which is just unexpressed anger eating you from the inside, and your psychic foreclosure where you locked into an identity too early and now you can’t explore, and your existential guilt because you feel bad for individuating AND feel bad for not individuating so you’re stuck.
Genuine question: why would you say this? What is your goal or point?
To judge and condemn him, without any hope for redemption, to make yourself feel better?
To punish him for sharing his darkness and shadow with the world?
Also, would "a pathetic monster" be this honest with himself or the world?
Something to try on this last day of 2025 (w/ paper and pen):
1. A quick audit of the past year.
What worked/didn't, what felt good/bad, how you changed/stayed the same, etc.
2. Then, a (much slower) audit of the year to come.
An imagining of the ways it went well, how you grew and did all the things you always wanted to do, fixed the relationships you cared about, took care of your body, became more of the person you've always wanted to be, etc.
Give yourself a picture to walk into and then go walk into it.
It's fucking epic that at any moment you can choose to remember
Oh, I'm the one holding the controller to this video game called MY LIFE
and then just steer your character toward thoughts and actions that undoubtedly make your ideal life more, rather than less, likely.
@NarcNormand@JackStr67850681@mtaibbi Government pressuring private companies to censor Americans for constitutionally protected speech is bad, actually.
There are, right now, actions you can take that will make your ideal life more, or less, likely.
This is always the case, in every single moment.
It should be our highest priority to remember this fact as often as possible.