If you can’t commit to something, then you can’t be trusted.
Right?
If you can’t use both logic and emotion to reach a decision — whatever decision you think is going to serve you best — and then stick to it, overtime you become fickle. You’ll make a decision and then spend all of this unnecessary energy grappling with yourself, just itching to defy yourself because that’s who you’ve taught yourself you are.
Only your conscious will rise up because it knows better. It nags you because you already know what you should do. You’re not an idiot, after all. You already made a decision, only now you’re looking for reasons to break it. And once you break it, you’ll decide it’s for the best because that’s what our minds do. If you don’t pay attention, your mind will take whatever circumstance you’re in and make excuses for your faults.
And the real issue is that even doing this in seemingly trivial ways adds up. You start to go against yourself, and the more you do that the more chaotic and fickle and unreliable you become even for simple things.
And if you can’t trust yourself, then who can you trust? If you can’t trust yourself, you become aware that maybe you can’t trust others because your relationship with other humans is a reflection of your relationship with yourself.
One reason I love Jordan Peterson is because he’s quite logical, but he admits that we are incredibly complex creatures and that there is a lot we can’t understand about ourselves. Even habits have meaning, but we’d have to remember the emotion that began that habit, and then interpret it from there. But the past isn’t static, because something that happens tomorrow could influence the way we interpret the past. Changing it.
I’ve been watching his biblical series on YouTube, and what I like best is that he doesn’t lecture at you, but more so with you. He isn’t so much telling you what he knows, but trying to figure it all out through talking about it. At the beginning he mentions something along the lines of him learning through teaching.
I relate to that because I feel like when I write here, I am able to solidify boundaries around ideas and explore them and draw comparisons, and deeply understand them better than I could just thinking or reading about them. It’s like if I can try to write them out and give them life, then I can implement what I know into this concrete thing in front of me. When I write things I understand them better. Even when I’m learning (i.e. like with this youtube series), I have to read the subtitles to take it and piece it together.
Going back to one of my favorite part of Jordan’s book, on page 212:
“If you say no to your boss, or your spouse, or your mother when it needs to be said, then you transform yourself into someone who can say no when it needs to be said. If you say yes when no needs to be said, however, you transform yourself into someone who can only say yes, even when it is very clearly time to say no. If you ever wonder how perfectly ordinary, decent people could find themselves doing the things the gulang camp guards did, you now have your answer. By the time no seriously needed to be said, there was no one left capable of saying it.
If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, then adversity will mow you down when it appears, as it will, inevitably. You will hide, but there will be nowhere left to hide. And then you will find yourself doing terrible things.”
So you see … it’s like, we’re subtly teaching ourselves whether we are trustworthy or not at all times. In tiny ways. One tiny lie builds on another, just as commitment to one thing builds on commitment to another.
You think it would be simple knowing this, but it never is.
I mean if it was, we’d all do what we know we should. We wouldn’t make things so difficult for ourselves. But instead, we are these incredibly complex beings, and we don’t even know a lot of why we do things because we just make up reasons after the fact. It’s so weird to think about honestly.
It’s like, how honest can you be with yourself? How self aware can you become? I used to think self-awareness was being aware of how you influence those around you, or the vibe you give off. Or maybe noticing the patterns you have in your relationships and where they might stem from. And that’s part of it for sure. But the part of self awareness that ties in here — it’s almost like watching yourself slip into either becoming your ideal self, or maybe in a series of bad choices, away from it. It’s being honest with yourself about what you’re avoiding, and the work you need to. I think more than anything, being self aware for me these days is recognizing how the choices I make are going to effect the next choices I make. Understanding what I need to sacrifice in order to be my happiest, most self-actualized.
There’s another part from JP’s book that’s been ringing in my ears ever since I read it. It’s in the chapter about only comparing yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
“Be cautious when you’re comparing yourself to others. You’re a singular being, once you’re an adult. You have your own particular, specific problems — financial, intimate, psychological, and otherwise. Those are embedded in the unique broader context of your existence. Your career or job works for you in a personal manner, or it does not, and it does so in a unique interplay with the other specific of your life. You must decide how much of your time to spend on this, and how much on that. You must decide what to let go, and what to pursue.” p.92
I just love this paragraph. I love how he takes every human and makes a complete universe out of them. I just feel so comforted, in such a logical way by the way his mind works. It’s almost like life’s easier after reading his book because he takes everything we’ve been painfully avoiding and brings it to light, to where we realize it’s not that scary after all. It just is what it is, and we get to choose what we do with the information.
Anyway, back to being unique and having our own specific issues to work through. Deciding how much effort we want to give this or that so that we can inch towards being happy with ourselves, on our on terms.
It’s just interesting because I often feel like two different people, which I can bring back to the ego. Or the “looking glass” phenomenon. There’s the me that knows what I should do, that knows what is actually going to make me happy. My higher self. But then there is this little child in me that wants to break the rules and doesn’t like being told what to do, and I can’t just ignore that part of me. It doesn’t work.
In that same chapter, Rule 4, he goes on to talk about paying attention like you never have before. Figuring out how much give and take you need as a human being in order to actually be productive. For instance, my higher self can be somewhat of a tyrant, judging me when I’m not perfect. Telling me what I should do, without taking into consideration that child in me that hates rules. So I have to make promises to myself. I tell myself, “Okay Chelsea, if you study for an uninterrupted hour, you can do something you enjoy.” And then I follow suit, but it’s interesting. Because I’ve noticed that the little tyrant in me feels that what I do is never enough. And if I listen to that, instead of working with myself, then I don’t do anything. I think, “Why begin? Why disappoint myself?”
Rewarding myself, working with both sides of who I am, makes me more productive. And to circle back to the beginning of this blog, it helps me trust myself. So that I can say no when I need to, or yes when I need to. When I work with myself like this, I set up healthy boundaries. It’s great.
“Don’t tell yourself, “I shouldn’t need to do that to motivate myself.” What do you know about yourself? You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can’t even set the clock on your microwave. Don’t over-estimate your self-knowledge.” p.109
Anyway, I think I’ll stop there. I actually started this post a few weeks ago, but I somehow always feel too messy to continue. I just have to remind myself that it’s okay to be messy. That’s the point of me writing these posts anyway. I’m trying to solidify these things within myself. Plus, my mom told me today that my Grandpa wouldn’t stop talking about how good of a writer I am. I literally don’t know if that’s true, and it makes me laugh that he thinks that. Truth is, people tell me that all the time, and I find it kinda confusing because I’m kinda just … talking to myself.
Aloha!