Do you know what it feels like to know you will never give up trying to help yourself?
I spent much of my life on the verge of hopelessness.
My life was a giant pendulum, swinging from “I can for sure change my life” to “I-am-the-biggest-failure-I-can’t-believe-I-thought-things-could-be-different” — year after year.
For years I heard people talk about needing to “go all in” to be successful and I would feel immediate resistance.
It sounded exhausting.
It sounded like a buzzword.
But, if I’m honest, it sounded like something that might work for people who weren’t hot messes like me.
And so I would outright dismiss messaging that in any way felt like jumping on the ‘going all in’ bandwagon.
I realize now this was my brain and body’s way of protecting me from my worst fear: that I would try everything there was to try, and I would still be the same.
It was a deeply entrenched defense mechanism.
When you know the pain of hopelessness, you know the pain of cynicism and the fear of the numbness of apathy.
Our brains find it easier to poke holes in concepts and point out all the reasons they won’t work than to experience the exquisite pain of daring to hope and risk being wrong or disappointed.
But here’s the thing.
Easier doesn’t mean less painful.
Winning the argument that no solutions exist isn’t really winning, is it?
When I got curious about my visceral reaction to the words “going all in”, I learned it was simply the phrasing.
My brain found it to be too vague, too abstract, too exhausting, too uncertain which = does not compute which = reject.
When I reframed it to “done giving up on myself”, my body immediately got on board.
I may not know what each day will hold, but I now know and believe in my bones one thing: that I will keep experimenting, testing, trying new things to help myself, for as long as it takes.
Translation: I’m done giving up on myself.
This realization calmed me in ways I never knew possible.
And you?
How would your life change if you decided you were done giving up on yourself?
What would that be worth to you?
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