As I grow older, I try to keep an eye on myself, see it's not all linear as I once expected it to be. I thought people had problems like bugs in a computer that they fixed and that was that. I tried to fix. I did my share of banging forehead against wall. I went to therapy, read the appropriate books, opened myself to it all. And to be fair, a lot did change, but it wasn't from black to white as I thought once. Rather, some things became more evident. It got harder unseeing things once I had seen them.
And one of those things that become more and more apparent as I go is the tendencies my self still has to betray me. I thought, once, that if you just acknowledged some issues, they naturally go away. Well, apparently not. I've found that they don't go away, but become in a way easier to side-step. I become more aware of the ways in which I'm trying to sabotage myself.
There's a tendency in us all to sabotage, and it's there all the time. For some, more present or perhaps more potent than for others. We're all trying to find a safety or what we translate as safety. We're all more or less programmed to seek out and repeat certain patterns, not all of them healthy.
I thought that would stop, and maybe it's silly to think so, but I did, and now I realize how that could never happen. How strong the impulse still is to betray yourself, to go off the rails. I've gone off the rails a lot in the past in an effort to capture something I don't know for sure I needed.
I think most of it happens so that you can learn certain things. I was talking the other day to somebody about a relationship I ended when I was 23. Looking back, I know why I ended it. It was because I was young and lost and needed to learn and grow up a bit. The man I was with was a terrific man, but I had a long way to go until I reached the level of maturity he was at in his own life, and it was a shame, in certain ways. I don't personally think of it as the one that got away or anything like that. I just think it was at the wrong time for me and it couldn't be otherwise.
But it's important to remember these things happen for a reason. In talking, in reminiscing, I also heard a cautionary tone - it was okay at 23. It might not be okay now. Meaning that, if you don't learn something the first time, you'll just keep going round, and some people waste a lot of time.
Obviously, it can't always be helped. You can't dictate the rate at which you learn, but at the same time, you know, if you can keep yourself from going off the rails needlessly, the same bloody way you divagated three years ago, maybe you should do that.
And what I'm noticing here is, we expect it to be all neat and clean. You learn your lesson, so to speak, and that's it. You're done.
That's not how learning works, is it? You have to keep going over the information periodically, updating what you know and refreshing, otherwise they don't let you on the road anymore after long enough has passed. In driving, they don't assume that just because you learned once, you'll always know.
So then, why do we so lightly assume it in life?
I didn't know better when I was 23. I do now. And once you do, you can't really unknow. That's the shame of it, because if you could really unknow it, then you could claim innocence again. But all you can really lay claim to now that you've gone around a bit is ignorance. You still know. But you can ignore it. The trouble is, there comes a day when eventually you'll kick yourself and be extremely fucking sorry that you ignored out of fear or comfort or a myriad of other reasons the knowledge already existing in your arsenal. That's the thing with life, it's seldom willing to wait. You're given chances to learn and grow, but only so many. The longer it takes for me to learn certain things, the fewer opportunities I will have to put my lessons into practice.
And I wouldn't want that.
What's your relationship like with the self-sabotaging part of you? Do you consider you keep it fairly under control? Does it occasionally wrestle itself to freedom, despite your best efforts? Do you let it win because you sometimes crave the breaking of bones and glass and all those nasty, alarming things that happen when you let your life go off rail?
I took the title and subtitle of this from a Danger Mouse/Jack White song, called "Two Against One":
I get the feeling that it's two against one
I'm already fighting me, so what's another one?
I tend to believe we keep making mistakes until we fully learn the lesson(s). My achilles heal was always placing too much trust in people and self-sacrifice, often at the expense of my own well-being. I never really thought of it as self-sabotage but there probably was an element of that in there somewhere. The common thread for me was it was usually people (women I dated, male friends, business partners) who had personality traits or achieved things in life I wished I had. I always tended to put the blinders on with these people and ignore red flags, in the end, I was always burned. The last time this happened (2019, with a business partner) I lost three years of work on screenplay development and had differed my salary for those years "for the good of the project" but it had the potential of being so much worse. I really felt like that was a last warning of sorts from the universe and I think I finally learned my lesson.
I hope you did :)
I definitely did after this last time.
Wow, this post really made me think. I liked how honest you were about your feelings and your journey. It’s true—learning isn’t just a one-time thing. Sometimes we think we’ve figured things out, but the same problems come back in new ways. I liked the part where you said it’s harder to "unsee" things once you know them. That really hit me.
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