Stop trying to change yourself

The idea of self-improvement encourages us to reflect on the things we want to change about ourselves or the things we don't like and try to change them. I used to tell myself all the time “I'm trying to be present”, “I'm trying to not need external validation”, “I'm trying to care less what other people think”.

The thing worth noticing is the word TRYING itself. Trying is an attempt to move from one state to another. The current state (what I was trying to move away from) was some version of “I don't feel present in relationships”, “I'm doing things for other people instead of for myself”. In trying so hard to change myself, I became psychologically attached to this idea of a Future Me that was happier and better off than me now.

I realized recently that the idea of this Future Me was actually holding me back from growing in the way I needed to grow. Holding onto it caused me to attach to a specific WAY I wanted to grow that I convinced myself would make me happy, and my fixation on that actually prevented growth from happening naturally.

It's like going for a walk. If you are already mentally locked onto the specific destination you want to reach, you'll miss things along the way. You won't notice the birds or the trees or the pretty nature because you are so narrowly focused on reaching the destination.

The thing I have found incredibly useful recently on a personal level is letting go of the destination. The reality is this idea of a Future Self that I need to move towards who is happier or better off than my Current Self is a totally made up thing anyway that only exists in my mind.

I worried that if I let go of the idea of the Future Self I wanted to become and just looked at myself in the mirror as I am today, nothing would ever change. The reality is that everything (including the Self) is in a perpetual state of change. It is the ego's desire for SPECIFIC change from which the need to CONTROL the change (to make sure it is what we want) arises and causes us to suffer more than we need to. This desire for control is a constant mental struggle and expenditure of energy that we often don't even realize we are making. And when we relax our grip, change and growth happen anyway, just more effortlessly and without the self-criticism we experience as a result of comparing our Current Self to this imaginary Future Self.

I want to close off and just say basically that I am not writing this from a place of feeling like I “figured anything out” in any permanent sort of sense. I do think an awareness of this stuff can be useful in helping us be happier and take ourselves a little less seriously, but I think part of being human is just slipping in and out of this awareness and we shouldn't beat ourselves up when we are unaware or TRY to always be aware because that would just be missing the point.