You are not your imperfections

I am currently going through a personal renaissance. It's wonderful, and honestly, it is all that I have wanted for a very long time. It is the answer to a lot of prayers, the true dawn signifying the end of a long night (though the sun has been rising for quite a long time, the sunrise is clear and brilliant now). I have energy. I am getting things done, after 7 years-7years!-of laziness that I desperately tried to escape from. It is like I just found the cage unlocked and ran right out.

I feel smarter, maybe because I have confidence in my own reasoning again. I feel in control of my destiny (to the extent that any human can control their destiny) and I truly feel that given enough time and work, I can accomplish just about anything. And I've been having a lot, a lot, a lot of revelations concerning riddles that have baffled me, traps that have ensnared me, and heavy weights that have kept me from flying.

I plan to share some of them with you over the course of the next week.

The first one is one that I had last night.

You are not your mistakes, failures, insecurities, imperfections, and transgressions.

You are going through a life journey, and the goal is to learn how to do better. How to be smarter, kinder, more present, more alive and awake, more human. Along the way, you will inevitably run across intermediate states that are less than ideal. Maybe you had a phase where you didn't work hard enough, or betrayed your best friend, or committed a crime, or forgot to brush your hair for two weeks.

And it is okay. These shortcomings are temporary-if you agree to change them-and they do not define you.

We all know someone who never apologizes when they have done something hurtful. I suspect that this is because their ego is threatened by admitting that they made a mistake. But doing something mean does not make you a mean person, even if you have been nasty for decades. You can always choose a kinder path.

It is a famous paradox: how to accept oneself as you are, while still working to improve yourself. I think it can be resolved by remembering that you are something so much more enduring and worthy than the temporary state you may be in in this moment. Love yourself for your positive traits, and seek to reform your negative traits, because they only determine who you are if you refuse to change them.

So many times, my focus on my work has been compromised because I felt a deep sense of guilt and shame for not working earlier, more, and harder. Ironically, the guilt led to me working later, less, and with a weaker intensity! In high school, I was a hard worker. I gave 100% of myself in everything I did. My senior year, I had a depression that killed my work ethic, and from then until just a few days ago, I had been operating at 10-20% of my true capacity.  I acted lazy, but now I am hardworking again. I realize now what I didn't know then: I was acting lazy, but I am not a lazy person. I could change, and now I have changed. But the guilt from the belief that I was a lazy person made attempting to do any work 1,000x harder than it needed to be.

Your shortcomings only dictate who you are if you let them.

In the next post, I will discuss how to cultivate motivation so that you can make these shortcomings a part of your past.