Acceptance

I like to daydream. I like envisioning a life where I’m the man I want to be, with the life I want to have, with the girl I want to love. I like running through take after take of pretend conversations or scenarios I may one day have with people, running through my lines until I find the right set of words I like and then peppering them into my real life conversations. Do we all do this? I’ve never asked anybody. There are times where no amount of daydreaming will prepare me for what life gives me.

I compare myself to other people, and most of the time, this act makes me sad. I always find some flaw in myself that this other person doesn’t have, and I enter into this bleak whirlwind of insecurity and resignation. I’m not as smart as this person, I’m not as strong as this person, I’m not as interesting as this person. It doesn’t matter if any of it is true or not because I still have that bit inside of me that won’t let me be content with who I am. It may be tiny, but it holds me back, and sometimes I succumb to my emotions and lash out at myself by drinking or not doing my work or shutting myself down and breaking every good thing I’ve built up in my life.

I want to say that that’s the old me. That I don’t do that anymore, but I don’t know for sure because today I compared myself to some guy that may or may not matter in the grand scheme of things. Instead of lashing out, though, I decided to hold it in and write about it tonight, and that’s what I’m doing. This is me lashing out, and I think — now that I’m writing this entry — that this is a good thing. It’s been over 80 days since my last drink, and I’ve been on a path to improve myself for over 80 days now, a path that I have not strayed from since I started this blog.

I don’t know the future. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to sustain what it is I’m doing, and part of me does care. If this can be my new normal, if this intensity for living never leaves me, then I’ll be happy. But the pragmatist in me knows that I can’t reasonably live my life this way forever. That’s why I’m so adamant on keeping and sustaining my habits and routines. As long as do small thing after small thing, day in and day out, then it’ll all add up to a life that can weather anything.

One of those small things must be accepting myself. I may not be the smartest or strongest or most interesting person in the world, but that’s okay. I don’t have to be any of those things. People can sense whether or not I like myself, and at that point it doesn’t matter who I want to be because who I am is someone that doesn’t deserve anybody. By accepting myself first, by loving myself first, then I’m opening the door for somebody else to love me, too. And that, in the end, is what I want.