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Hi Doc, long time reader, thank you for putting out so much good stuff, you’re a big help for a lot of people.
A bit of backstory for me, I had an interesting childhood, abusive father, bullied in school etc. which really hammered my self-esteem. I basically bottled everything up for years until it all exploded. Ended up spiraling into depression, had a passive suicide attempt about 3 years ago and hit rock bottom really. The good news, since then I’ve had 2 spells of counseling and my mental health is now much better. I’ve also worked quite a bit on myself, to the point where I’ve come from never having a date to having a couple of short relationships, couple of casual things and I’ve improved immensely in that part of my life. This is way more success than I ever thought I’d have.
The thing that’s inspired me to write in today is that even though I can see how far I’ve come and all I’ve achieved, I still find everything absolutely, painfully difficult. Socializing exhausts me in general, but especially in bars and clubs. I always seem to be on guard and frankly, it’s all wearing me down. There is still this block I have mentally, where I’m so scared of getting hurt again or opening up that I can’t really just let myself go and make the moves I want to, or I shut down interactions/ relationships that could go somewhere due to fear basically. I’m also incredibly nervous about doing anything that would jeopardize my mental health. I left my last job because it was causing me to slide again and I don’t want to risk ever getting near to where I was 3 years ago.
Another thing that’s laying it on right now is that I’m currently traveling. A couple of my friends are absolutely amazing with women, they make it look ridiculously easy and go from one hot girl to the next like they get handed out with the cereal. They are great guys who absolutely deserve their success and I’m happy for them, but it just highlights to me that even after all this work I’ve done I’m still no better than bang average on a good day at all of this. This is what is getting me down. I’ve read all the articles you’ve written about staying internally validated and not comparing yourself to others and it’s all good advice, but I’m struggling to keep everything focused on the right things, which ends up with me taking nut shots to my self-esteem over the frustration.
I’m still young, mid-20s in decent health and everything, so I know I have the time, but it’s just so draining to actually realize how far I’ve still got to go after all this work. My motivation to keep going with the whole self-improvement thing is waning, I’ve stopped approaching, don’t do speed dating or anything else that I had success with. I went on a couple of dates with this girl 2 months or so ago and just had no emotional energy left to give. I just see it all as a grind and I struggle to deal with it at the moment. I know you went through similar sorts of challenges back in your “bad old days”, so any advice you could give would be hugely appreciated. How would you recommend I get through this?
Thanks
Tired of The Grind
First of all, ToTG: congratulations on all the work you’ve put into your mental and emotional health, and all the progress you’ve made. That takes a lot of grit and courage, and you should be proud of just how far you’ve come.
In fact… that’s part of what I want to talk to you about. See, you’re doing one of the things that I used to do back in my bad old days: you’re so focused like a laser on the end goal – being able to get women like your buddies – that you’re missing just how much progress you’ve made. The problem with what you’re doing is that you’re working under the assumption that you and your friends started at the same place and the fact that you’re not doing as well as them means something’s wrong with you. But that’s not it. That’s not it at all. You didn’t start at the starting line; you had to sneak your way past guards, climb over walls and through air ducts just to get into the godd**n arena, never mind into the race itself.
But here’s the thing: you f**king got there. You made it past all of those hurdles, things that would make most other people say “f**k this noise” and turn around, and got your a** into the game. Yeah, you’re not at the same point as people who had some advantages you didn’t… but they didn’t have to fight the way you did or as hard as you did. So you need to take a moment and recognize that you’ve fought long and hard to get where you are and that is godd**n amazing. You’re not some third-string bench-warmer, you’re Rudy, man.
Of course, all of this means that you’re going to have some scars. I mean, c’mon: you’ve been through the fires of hell and you’ve got the ashes to prove it. But that block you’re dealing with right now isn’t fear, it’s the anticipation of fear. You’re so worried about the feeling of “Oh god does this mean it’s going to happen again” that you’re trying to avoid anything that might trigger that fear… including the things that you long for. And that’s understandable. That part of what makes us human. But the fear is an illusion. It’s a phantom. It’s the exaggerated, funhouse mirror version of reality. The fear is honestly worse than the reality.
Right now, you’re spending a lot of your energy trying to avoid your fears – more energy than it would actually take to confront them, in fact. You just keep convincing yourself that you’re going to lose, that you are inevitably going to fail, so there’s no point in trying. Small wonder you’re drained; you’re letting that fear sap everything from you, without even taking the little victories that tell you that you’ve got far more going for you than you realize.
The sooner you learn how to grapple with that fear and push through it, the sooner you’ll realize you’re further along than you believe you are.
And the easiest way to deal with that fear? Plan for failure. Expect failure. Because you know what? Failure’s gonna happen. A lot. To everyone. Even your buddies, who attract women the way cheese attracts mice, fail. You just don’t notice it because you’re paying too much attention to their successes. But success doesn’t teach you anything. A lot of times success is just luck – or you end up taking the wrong lessons from those successes. When a plane comes back from a mission shot full of holes, you don’t patch those holes and assume you fixed the problem; those are clearly places where it could get shot up and still make it. You want to pay attention to the places where getting shot full of holes brought down the plane and work on those areas.
So it is with failure. Failure teaches you valuable lessons. You learn to recognize what went wrong and how to avoid it next time. You start to learn your real strengths and weaknesses, not the ones you think you have. And the most important lesson you learn is this: failure isn’t fatal. You can mess up – badly, even – and still survive. You may not get with that one woman… but you can pick yourself up, dust yourself off and try again with someone else.
Pain’s inevitable, my dude. Nobody can avoid getting hurt. But while pain may be inevitable, suffering is optional. And you suffer far more from trying to avoid pain than you do learning how to take the hits, roll with them and pop back up again because you’ve given up on even the chance of success.
These are choices you’re making, my dude. You’re choosing to believe that you will fail and it will break you. It won’t. You’re stronger than that. Yeah, you’ll fail. It’s part of the learning process. Everyone fails. But when you learn from those failures, when you dare to push yourself back up to your feet again? That’s when you win.
You have to believe that you can survive. You hold that power in your hands.
You can win if you dare.
You’ve got this.
Good luck.
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This article originally appeared on Doctor Nerd Love
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