Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart. — Tyler Durden
I assume you’re like me, you had bad experiences as a child or even a fully functional adult and you had no idea how to cope with them because you didn’t have any courses on “handling trauma”. As a result, we kept those experiences somewhere deep inside our minds just to know what we should avoid next time. It seems like sometimes those experiences go deep enough that we don’t even know where they are anymore but apparently, they are there, and they are doing their jobs keeping us away from danger when they sense the cue.
Allow me to call this collection of scars “insecurities” and just blame them for all the shitty decisions I’m making and all the awful emotions I’m experiencing because at the end I have something to blame and this makes me feel better. “it’s not my fault that I’m insecure, it’s my childhood’s fault or exes or whatever, I was a victim of life’s unfairness, so I better avoid getting emotionally close to someone and keep myself busy with Netflix.”
In my case especially, I like to know the causes. What is the cause of this fear that I have when I want to present in front of a crowd? My line of thoughts was straightforward: finding the cause -> understanding the problem -> fixing it. Anyway, recently I realized that I know (or at least have some ideas about) roots of my major insecurities. Some of them are deep into my childhood and some in my previous emotional relationships (didn’t search anywhere else tho). I can even track back to a few specific events that hurt me most. Well, guess what; I found myself knowing them but it’s not really helping.
One day I was talking to myself about how should I handle insecurities. Not going to details, I still have a shit load of trust issue and while everything is fine on the surface, there’s a monster lurking and whispering “they will find a centre in you, they will chew it up and leave”. As I said, I can pinpoint specific events that created this monster and after a few years, it became strong enough to be my new self. “The more you love the more you will suffer at the end because there’s an end and it’s just around the corner right where you’re not looking at.”
I was pretty sure about the procedure anyway, finding the cause -> understanding the problem -> fixing it, I was having my internal brainstorm session with all of my different selves and they were recalling memories and spitting out their wildest guesses about how this monster emerged from those memories. Suddenly my smarter-self came to the meeting having that “wtf are you doing again?” face. He said, “you know, you really look stupid from outside.” Of course, we, intellectuals, played cool by waiting for his proposal raising eyebrows and sending the “please proceed” signal with our bodies.
He continued “let me show you, imagine this: tomorrow is a big day because you have a meeting with whoever, you wake up, do the rituals then jump in the car and while everything looks as it should be, the steering wheel goes nuts. You turn it but it doesn’t work and the car goes straight. Probably like every normal intelligent human you’ll stop the car so you won’t crash it and put a sign for others not to crash you. Here’s when you’re acting like a normal potato now. What you are doing is like sitting in the car thinking what could be the cause? You even start looking at the wheels, open your laptop and start googling stuff, watching online tutorials, since none of them is working you go back home and order mechanical engineering textbooks and seat there and wait and think and think and think why my car is weird I need to go to work.” Then he left us with the obvious conclusion: “sometimes it doesn’t help to know why and how.”
That was when it clicked for me. I have to modify my procedure to just fix it because yeah it’s good to know why shit happened and how it’s still echoing in my life but sometimes it’s just not the right time for it. My insecurities exist and they are constantly influencing my life like a car that is not turning when I need it to turn. What comes next is not me sitting in the car finding the cause -> understanding the problem -> fixing it, but to find a temporary solution to the real problem: I gotta get to that meeting!
We have milestones and meetings to reach but then after few years we look back and whoops, all we were doing was either being totally in the wrong side of the city because the car isn’t turning or having worse tragedies because the car isn’t turning or stopped somewhere thinking and trying to figure out why the car isn’t turning. With this short story, I wanted to remind myself and anyone who needed the nudge that we wanted to be somewhere else when we started the engine and turned on the music. I remembered my meeting when I was reading Fight Club after about 6 years and again the same sentence slapped me: “Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.”
Ok, read it again but this time let’s call the sceptic sama, “Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.” We can pretty much agree on the first and second part, by definition if nothing is static, then stuff are changing. But then the direction here might be a point to discuss. I thought with myself that “well they might be falling apart but what does falling apart mean anyway?” So I just skipped the last sentence but to be honest it didn’t make it less scary. It made it worth experiencing. I thought “whatever everything, keep on changing and fall apart if you want and let me experience falling apart and see how is it anyway” WTF you might ask. One of myselves asked the same and the response was this:
“Give me the bird-eye view, I have insecurities and their function is to keep me away from the same pain in future. What pain is it actually? everything falling apart and me being left alone at the end of the story. Firstly, at the end of “the” story, I will be alone no matter how many loved ones are around me. Secondly, what is so dangerous about it that made you preoccupied enough that you are keeping yourself alone to protect yourself from being alone? Lastly and as a result, get out of your insecurities, take the taxi and get to the meeting.”
I don’t see my way as the fundamental law of handling insecurities, what I did basically was to acknowledge them and just ignore their pathogenic whispers. I also don’t know if this way works for you but I thought it worths sharing for two reasons, one is to remind whoever is reading this that “we’re all more or less fucked up and to some degree, it might actually be our own fault by giving the control to our freaked out minds afterwards.” The second reason is to remind you to keep on plotting this bird-eye view. Credits are for those cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) theories that are best summarised in Captain Jack Sparrow’s quote:
“The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem”
Are you sure that you know your attitude about your problem set aside the problem itself?
