The trouble of self-acceptance when your whole identity was built on self-improvement – a reflection

In a previous post, I discussed how I’m rejoining social media, which led to a kind of self-discovery that I wanted to explore.

Not using social media made me feel better than others. That’s the cold, hard truth.

The same is true for many of the other self-improvement traits I built.

It may not be healthy, but it’s what I needed to grow. For my entire life before changing, I’d felt less-than, felt that others were better than me, that I was never enough. A small part of me still feels like that.

And so I simply over-compensated by becoming so ‘good’ at life that I was, ‘objectively’ (so I thought; read ‘subjectively’), better than other people.

It’s a struggle I’m beginning to realise and an issue I have begun to work on. The issue of re-adjusting and accepting my past self, prior to my development, and recognising that everyone is equal and should be treated equally.

Trouble is, my new identity was literally built on the idea of being better. Which causes many problems, too many to go into on a post about social media, and it’s precisely those problems that I’m trying to solve by rejoining social media.

And so in this post, I’ll be delving into this idea a bit further, in an effort to help better understand myself and hopefully others in a similar situation. It’ll mostly be a conversation with myself, almost like a journal entry, that I’m sharing to 1) give a better insight into my brain and 2) show the process I followed to arrive at an answer, thus giving someone else an idea of a process they can follow to come to a similar answer.

What do I mean by the above quote?

In particular, I want to focus on the idea of building an identity and/or personality on being better. This presents problems with self-acceptance as the two are almost opposites when viewed in extremes. On the one hand, you’re striving for constant improvement in your life, and on the other, you’re accepting downfalls and flaws.

Now, there certainly is some overlap between the two. And I believe it’s healthy to sit within that overlap. In essence, that overlap could be summed up as the following:

If you can change something, seek to improve it. If you can’t, seek to accept it.

While that’s not entirely applicable or entirely accurate, I believe it’s a good rule of thumb for the relationship between self-improvement and self-acceptance.

For my situation specifically, I’m attempting to exist more within the circle of acceptance; at least, that’s the case right now. I’ve spent a long time in the circle of improvement and need to see “what’s on the other side”, as learning self-acceptance will help me to accept others.

And that, I think, is really the crux of the matter. My obsessive desire to improve myself meant I got angry or annoyed when others were not working on themselves. Because I couldn’t accept myself for who I was/am, it meant I struggled to unconditionally accept others for who they were.

It pissed me off when people used social media. It pissed me off when people engaged in “self-destructive” behaviours, like excessive drinking, pornography usage, or playing games in every free second they had spare.

My relationship with improvement was/is one of necessity. I had to change, to improve, in order to become a better person. As such, my view of improvement is synonymous with necessity. People need to improve. Acceptance was a foreign concept. How could anyone simply live just as they are? It baffled me.

I think, in part, this stems from a desire to make something of my life, to not be forgotten. To accept, I thought, was to give up. But really, acceptance is to keep fighting. Acceptance is recognising your flaws, acknowledging you cannot change them, and then moving on with your life. Does that sound like giving up to you?

And yet a part of me struggles to grasp this ‘truth’. That’s what I want to explore here.

Why do I struggle to accept acceptance?

For those that don’t know, in my second year of university, I went through a pretty dramatic personality shift.

In short, I essentially turned my life around, ‘grew up’, and started living for myself and for my future. I became a completely different person.

As part of that, I had to ‘kill’ my past self. For a long time, I considered him to be a different person than me. We were, after all, practically opposites.

Now I’m recognising that that past me did not need to be killed per se, nor is he a different person – he is me, and I am he.

Of course, it was important that I did previously consider him dead. That was a very useful tool for me in my personal growth – if he were alive, I’d have a base to work from, and that’s not what I needed. I needed a completely fresh start.

And yet, had I known or been wiser at the time, I could have gradually worked on my flaws over time. If I’d have done so, I’d be a different person today, but perhaps a better one. Perhaps much worse. We’ll never know.

Alas, the point I’m making is this. My identity was built on completely ignoring my past, effectively denying the existence of 19 years of my life.

In other words, my identity was built on the opposite of acceptance.

Unravelling; considering practical steps towards acceptance

So how do I – or you – go about accepting something that was denied for so long? Accepting something that is the opposite of everything we are?

Honestly, I don’t have the answer right now, but perhaps I’ll discover it through philosophical exploration. That’s the point of this post.

If my identity was built on ignoring the past, and the past is what I’m trying to accept, it seems to follow that I’d need a change of identity to accept the past.

Or, to explain in a more effective and accurate way, I should re-develop my past identity, to an extent, and absorb that into my current identity. To revive my past self, to follow the process of self-acceptance with him – myself – that should have been done many years ago.

I cannot accept something that is not present. As such, must I manifest behaviours and thoughts that my old self had in an effort to accept those and move on?

It may sound dangerous, or a bad approach to the problem, yet I think this is what has to be done. It scares me more than it does you, trust me.

So how do I actually do that?

Well, to start, it’s worthwhile listing some of those behaviours and thought patterns. Note, I will not be attempting to adopt all of these behaviours/thoughts. Some are toxic and would be extremely damaging to reform, such as a porn addiction. Other thoughts, such as those of low self-esteem or low self-worth, will have to be recognised and accepted rather than adopted, in order for me to ‘absorb’ and work through them.

Who was my past self?

I’m prefacing this section with the note that I’m finding it difficult to speak of my past self in the first person (I was this, I was that) rather than he, as I’ve referred to my past self in the second person since the change. Building this picture will help us both understand the person I was.

“Phase 1” James was a boy. I was addicted to pornography. I had no perceptions of the future or of having any goals. I lived for the moment, but not in the mindful way that would be healthy; such living was at a detriment to my present and future self. When I wasn’t drinking, I was either playing video games or watching porn.

I valued others over myself. I was a people pleaser. I gave others, particularly girls, my time and energy then got mad when they wouldn’t return that. I was a ‘nice guy’, a beta, an AFC. And I was extremely socially anxious (and a little inept).

I took pride in drinking a lot. A personal ‘achievement’ was that I went out clubbing every week in my first year of uni, without fail. Often twice or thrice.

My thought patterns were of low self-worth, which was reflected in my behaviour, which, in turn, reinforced those thoughts. They were mostly unconscious; I don’t remember being able to recognise my own thoughts as I can now. And so it was effortless to remain in that place, because it’s all I had ever known. In fact, I didn’t even realise there could be something different.

Essentially, a lot of these habits were continuations of my teenage years at secondary school. Do the bare minimum work at school, come home, play video games until it got late and/or my parents complained about noise, go to bed, watch porn and masturbate for 1-2 hours, sleep until the last minute when I had to get up for school, repeat.

And look, I know I’m describing a phase that a lot of people go through. Mostly guys, even if to a lesser extent. For me, it felt worse than it sounds there, or my perception of it may be exaggerated because I had to recognise it as so bad that I had to change.

Regardless, that’s where I was. And that was me, not a different person.

How do I accept my past self?

Understanding this side of myself has, in a way, been useful in accepting that side of me. And I think perhaps my previous idea that I had to become that self again to accept it would be an ineffective strategy.

Rather, I think the best strategy is to simply move on. To recognise and accept that that was who I was, and that I am today a different person. You cannot change your background. You can deny it, as I did for a long time, but that background is what made you who you are today. My past self, Phase 1 James, was the reason that James today exists. And for that I am grateful.

In terms of practically accepting, I think the process is to no longer resist it, or to recognise that resistance and move past it. Of course, this will be a long-term process; I cannot say now that I accept my past and leave it at that. I have to instead internalise that acceptance and prove it by recognising and removing resistance in situations in which my past arises.

I am who I am now due to the past. That is how I remove resistance; I recognise that without my past, I would not be the person I am today. It helps that I like the person I am today, which, for someone also struggling with their past, I would suggest is a good starting point. Like – and even love – who you are today, then use that as the starting point for acceptance of the past.

What this all means for me today

My past self was a boy focused on the present at the expense of the future. For him, the future did not exist. It was all about the now; akin to a ‘here for a good time not a long time’ personality.

My ‘new’ self was a young man focused on the future at the expense of the present. I worked on myself and on business with the idea of a better, fantasy future in which everything was perfect (which, of course, would never exist). This, upon reflection, was clearly overcompensation.

Thus, it follows that my present, current self should find a balance between the two. And this is what I’ve been working on, even prior to writing this article and exploring this concept. To start enjoying life for what it is now, while working on the future. Or, at the very least, recognising that I have a future and regularly – not excessively – helping out that future self. Investing in myself and my future while enjoying the life I have right now. That means making friends, spending time with others, pursuing activities I enjoy, taking off days, and whatever else I feel like doing. Recently I’ve been getting into climbing, so I’m really excited to see where that goes.

One thing that I’m trying to use to help with this is simply allowing myself to not feel self-pressure to work towards my goals. It’s okay if I have ‘unproductive’ days where I don’t make any progress towards my goals. It’s okay if the only thing I did today was practicing positive habits.

Now, this releasing of self-pressure was kind of forced onto me. I’ve recently come out of a 2-month rut, the lowest emotional point of my life (so far), during which I made very little to no progress towards any goals. It truly was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I’m not going to go into detail here.

And yet, there have been some extremely valuable lessons and insights that have come out of it – not to mention a renewed sense of motivation, direction, and an idea of how I want to live and who I want to be.

I’ve found that releasing that self-pressure, and maintaining that released self-pressure post-rut, have helped me feel happier, more relaxed, and able to enjoy life more. I’ve come to accept that simply doing positive habits or reading non-fiction on a daily basis (with the intention of future application) is enough of an investment in my future.

It’s the idea that I’ve at least done something to help my future self. I don’t need to give my future self everything I have now; after all, he’ll have everything he has, and the things I’ve prepared for him. So the balance, as I see it, is making his life as easy as I can while not being at a detriment to my own – because he is me and I am he.

Perhaps my problem wasn’t accepting my past self, it was accepting myself outside of the present – past and future.

And perhaps that resistance was caused by the fact that by accepting my past and future, I’d be accepting the fact I won’t be here forever. Accepting myself, then, means accepting my mortality.

But that’s another thought process to follow another time. So for now, my plan is to notice resistance to my past self, then recognise that my past is integral to who I am now in an effort to accept it.

At last, I’ve come to a suitable conclusion that I’m happy with, and I hope it’s been of some use to you too, reader.

Until next time, peace.

James