/reader

But recently I have found myself wondering if I would still have these inner expectations if I was born in some remote village up in some mountain. Where did these expectations come from? Why do I feel like I have to do certain things? Do I continually guilt trip myself because I am a product of a competitive city-state with no natural resources? Sometimes I think about monastics – they spend their entire waking life meditating and doing chores, do they feel bad about themselves for not being creative? Maybe if I was born few hundred years ago I would either be hunting, gathering or performing some hard labour. I wouldn’t have the time or the mind-space to have existential anxieties.

Somehow I just have this inner-belief that I ought to feel alive, though intellectually I would not ask someone without limbs to run a marathon, so why do I keep wanting my deficient brain to feel something it can’t?

It seems I have this deeply ingrained wiring predisposed to unhappiness, unable to appreciate what I have in the present. I keep wanting more, feeling I should be more, when in reality I have already covered an unspeakable distance. I am blind to my own accomplishments, and I feel like I can never meet my own expectations of myself.

I just wish I can accept myself more. I never had this acceptance as a child, and now it has become a lifelong curse. It is as though once we miss the window to feel whole, we would permanently lose the capacity to feel so. This sense of brokenness plagues everything I do, especially at rest.

But isn’t wishing for this self-acceptance a form of an unrealistic self-expectation too?

The strange thing with life and the human psyche is that the more we want something, the more it seems to elude. It may come to us naturally if we stop grasping after it. So many times I have found myself to be strangled by my psyche, only to suddenly break out of it. Things that used to bother me tremendously have lost their power over me over the years.

Inner work is mostly invisible, yet it determines so much of how our lives would unfold. There is nothing to show for it. No measurements, no outward accomplishment. It is not like accumulate badges when we work through our inner battles. I tend to place disproportionate value on what can be seen, but becoming my self is a tedious creative process too. My adhd brain seems to apply to how I view my life, quickly forgetting all the obstacles I’ve worked hard to overcome and instead hyperfocusing on all that I cannot overcome.

Can I design a better system for myself to review periodically so I can appreciate my own long and lonely journey? This is partially why I like to look back at “on this day” entries for my journals because the contrast between my past and present selves reminds me of all the work I have done. I intellectually know that it is not just my creative output that is representative of my life, but the mindset seems deeply ingrained in me.

Perhaps more than creative output, the harder thing to know is where I am as a person. Monastics meditate and do repetitive mundane chores because they prioritise being in harmony with their mind. My inner conflicts come from a misalignment in how I think about my priorities and how I act towards them. It is a form of forgetting I suppose. What I truly want for myself is optimal health which is inclusive of psychological health, yet my automatic default is to judge myself based on my capacity to be creative. Psyches are weird.

I feel like my weekly posts are different from my private morning pages. Somehow writing on a public blog brings out an analytical side of me that may not necessarily exist otherwise. The process of writing this post has once again unwound the tangles in my messed up mind.

Inner expectations can imprison us deeply and infinitely, but if we are lucky enough to ever step out and look at it from a distance, we would be able to see that they are arbitrary and illusory.