If you’re reading this piece, you’re a conscientious, competent, even hyper-competent, person, but you don’t spend much time thinking about what you’re doing right or how well you do what you do. Nope. Why spend time appreciating what a good job you did just now? You’re too busy thinking of ways to improve your already better-than-average performance.
If you’ve read this far, it’s safe to assume that you’re a bit self-critical.
That’s why you can’t resist the negative tone in the title, “You Haven’t Already Lifted Yourself and Your Morose Mood Up By Your Bootstraps.”
Here’s something you can connect with: implied self-criticism. Your self-critical mind expects that a section titled “You Haven’t Already Whatever” will reinforce the critical voices in your head that are berating you.
These voices all agree: Of course you haven’t accomplished anything, your-own-mood-wise. These snarky voices assume from the get-go that your decades of spectacular job performance, eons of volunteer work, and multiple magna cum laude college degrees Don’t Count. (Of course not! Anybody could do that! Couldn’t they?)
Your habitual masochism homes in on the familiar tone of self-criticism. It expects this section to helpfully point out your shortcomings, both your well-known shortcomings and maybe even point out some novel ones, so you can focus on them and brood about them.
GOTCHA!
I’m NOT, in fact, going to pile on with the self-critical voices in your head; I’m going to do the complete opposite. I’m going to tell you and the butt-headed voices trying to mess with you, in front of God and everybody else, that those voices are not just wrong, they’re stupid.
I’ll tell you why you haven’t already perfected yourself and fixed the world. Because changing one’s own mood is incredibly difficult. It’s a miracle that anyone ever manages to accomplish it, to any degree. Because to shift your depressive mood is basically to change your point of view on Everything In The Universe.
It’s true: Given a fulcrum and a lever arm, you can shift weighty objects.
Given enough rope and pulleys, you can move extremely, extremely heavy items.
But your point of view has no weight and no mass. It is abstract; it is self-contradictory. You can’t even see your own perspective, because you’re standing right in the middle of it.
It probably would be easier literally to shift the position of everything in the universe than it is to shift your weightless, omnipresent, shifting, multivalent, point of view about Everything In The Universe RE: Yourself.
Shifting Your Relative View on The Entire World is a bit more challenging.
Add my voice to the nasty battalion of snarky voices in your head? No way!
In fact, I honor you for continuing to fight this battle.
Ha! Bet you didn’t see that one coming!
In fact, what this piece truly is, is me congratulating you on having reached this point in your life. You’ve created a life in which you have the leisure time, the energy, the literacy, the optimism, and the motivation to improve yourself. This big-ass achievement is demonstrated by the facts that
- You’ve found this post, and
- You’ve read this far.
I think you’re great.
You’re a regular St. George, on a brave horse, taking on some serious-ass dragons, when you work on shifting your pessimistic, depressive mood, when you bravely take the risk of being optimistic, and leaving the cultural comfort zone of snarkiness, sarcasm, and nihilism that allows those in it to risk nothing.
These dragons are widely held fears and beliefs. Here is a partial list of monsters you’re facing down, you armor-clad, broadsword-wielding badass, you:
- The dragon “It Won’t Work, and You’re Naive (i.e., Stupid) for Trying.” This monstrous cultural belief hisses, “Trying it, and not doing it perfectly on the first attempt, means you’re an idiot. And you only get one attempt.”
- The demon that calls itself “It* Can’t Be Done.” *“It” = “Everything positive, fun, that you WANT to do, especially anything that you hope might possibly help someone.” This monster rolls its bulging eyes while snarling, “It can’t be done. DUH! And, by the way, you’re stupid for trying.”
- The monster called “What Will People Think?” This monster can be identified by its thousands of eyes, all of them watching you, all the time, even when you’re in the bathroom. When we try to elude it by doing absolutely nothing, it still follows us everywhere, adding to its lengthy list of our faults.
Of course there are more. They’re omnipresent in our 21st-century American t.v. culture. And they’re scary.
And yet, here you still are, still bravely battling them!
I thank you for your service. Your progress in battling them helps us all.
In fact, I’d like to present you with some extra gadgets you might find handy in while you are thoroughly and definitively kicking their collective asses. (Not that you need these, but I want to feel like I’m helping).
- “It Won’t Work, and You’re Naive (i.e., Stupid) for Trying” insists that you get only one try. Specialized weapon: This monster is incompetent at math and terrible at recordkeeping. You can thwart it by always acting as though you’ve never tried whatever it is before in your life. Because, in a sense, it’s always your first try. Don’t even call what you’re doing an attempt: Call it “a rough outline,” or “a design iteration.” These magic words render you invisible to it.
- “It Can’t Be Done.” Specialized weapon: This dragon’s pronouncement is a big, fat, worthless logical fallacy. You can’t even make the claim “X can’t be done” and expect anybody to take it seriously. What you could say is, “It hasn’t been accomplished yet.” Think of all the things that at one time “could not be done,” that now are done. Routinely. Every day:
- Airline travel.
- Real-time two-way video communication with your grandkids on the other side of the planet.
- Humans’ running a four-minute mile.
- Outpatient cataract surgery that not only replaces your eye’s no-longer-transparent lens, but also corrects your 20/100 vision at the same time. Without stitches.
This dragon doesn’t have a scaly leg to stand on.
- “What Will People Think?” Weapon against which it is defenseless: Remind it that Nobody’s Looking. Remind it that anybody who would be looking, and keeping score against you, is not being a good friend to you. AT ALL. Truly,the opinion of anyone this nasty doesn’t really count.
There’s also the chance that anyone who might be watching you, who might be judging you, will notice what a satisfying time you’re having not giving a shit, stop watching you, and start having her own fun.
P.S.: One more Gotcha!:
I lied in the title above. Well, yes, perhaps it is true. You have not lifted yourself from pessimism. . .
. . . Not completely, entirely, once and for all.
Not YET.
However, it is just as true that you HAVE begun to shift your point of view. You HAVE begun to lift your mood out of the gutter.
You are in the process.
You just have not completed it. Yet.
The hardest part of getting the ball rolling — of doing anything — is overcoming the starting inertia.
Therefore, we may safely conclude that from here on out, it’s all downhill.
And you’re on a roll.
Think UP! 