chapter 22: you're going to ruin everything
on not trusting yourself to keep good things
From the outside, my life appears to be good. Great, even.
Especially with all the recent milestones: Josh and I celebrated our 3rd anniversary, I got assigned a big project at work, and VERY MADZ hit 100 subscribers.
A loving relationship, a solid career, and a dedicated hobby. Who could complain?
Not me, of course. No, I’m not complaining. I’m agonizing.
When good things happen to me, my trust goes out the window. Maybe it’s my perfectionism talking, but my internal pressure reaches record-breaking heights when life is going well. With good news comes the possibility of messing everything up, after all.
To me, ruining a good thing feels worse than never having it in the first place. It’s like what most grumpy, love-averse fictional characters always intone: why love something if you’ll just lose it and get hurt? The same is true for me: why achieve anything if you’re just going to ruin it all?
As I said in chapter 21, I’ve often found it easier to take the “easy” way out; to not try at all. If I didn’t try, my failures couldn’t hurt me - I wouldn’t risk shattering my self-image as a high-achieving young woman. Because if failure has the potential to destroy my entire identity, imagine what broken success could do! I don’t even want to think about it.
Stuck in these thought patterns, it’s hard to try and hard to keep going once I start something. It’s a paralyzing disaster.
Part of me wants to mess everything up on purpose, so I never find out just how badly I can ruin my own fortunes. When faced with a budding success, my mind drifts to thoughts of self-sabotage, hoping to interfere before I can ruin the whole thing myself. What if I just *didn’t* do the project for work? Or started a horrible fight with Josh? If I just stopped, I’d never have to see myself fail; I’d never get the evidence to prove that I ruin everything I touch.
Talking about this with my therapist, he equated it to the owner of a new car purposely scratching the paint. The first fender bender would be too devastating - it’s a brand-new car, after all. So, to avoid the pain of ruination, the car owner does it themself.
It made perfect sense to me at the time. I’d do that too!, I thought to myself.
But that’s no way to live: sabotaging your success in hopes of never failing.
Clearly, I’m here, so the destructive thoughts haven’t won. As easy as it would be to just stop writing, writing is easier than being unfulfilled. Like the self-discipline Instagram gurus like to say: you have to choose your hard. Fighting against my inner monologue is hard, but the compounded pain of inaction is harder.
If you do nothing, you’re going to ruin everything becomes true. By doing nothing, you ruin any chance you have of success; of self-discovery. Failure will always teach us more than fear.
So, just like those love-averse fictional characters, I’m learning that maybe it’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all (though in my case, it’s better to have tried and ruined something than to never have tried at all).
XOXO,
Madeleine