The things I’m most embarrassed to have done over the course of my life have almost universally been the result of self-consciousness.
I’ve worked on this a lot over the years, and the aspects of myself that I’m most proud of (and which enable the most joy and satisfaction) today, are the result of these changes.
This sort of change isn’t straightforward: it requires recognizing what’s going wrong, understanding the problem, and then eventually fixing it.
Simply noticing that something’s wrong can be a big hurdle, and for many ills, even those that plague us our entire lives, we’ll never successfully make this leap.
We might notice the negative consequences, but maybe we never take the time to trace them all the way back to their source, for whatever reason. Perhaps we’re too busy or distracted, maybe we try and fail a couple of times before deciding it’s just not worth it or possible.
Whatever the specifics, even knowing something’s not ideal, we may come to accept it rather than successfully arriving at a state of understanding.
Understanding is required if we’re going to make an earnest attempt at fixing anything, and fixing broken (or otherwise non-optimal) things can also be difficult, as it’s not clear (for instance) how to become less self-conscious in different contexts.
We might know we need to rebalance or temper aspect of our personalities (anger or anxiety, ego or perceived inadequacy), or that there are elements of our lives we need to invest in with more intent. But holding a map with a destination marked on it doesn’t mean the journey to that goal will be trivial. In some cases that enhanced awareness of the problem, that map, may actually make us less likely to pursue the solution because the distance is too far or the challenges seem too overwhelming.
Not every issue needs to be fixed, nor does every problem have a solution beyond “learn to live with it.”
Not every issue can be fixed by the people we are today, either, and sometimes if we want to complete one journey, we’ll need to complete another (or several others) first.
That said, the better our sense of self, the more likely we are to understand what elements of our lives are serving us and which are not.
The more we allow ourselves to think through these elements, the more likely we are to eventually invent or stumble-upon potential solutions.
And the more things we try, the more experiments we run in the pursuit of said solutions, the more likely it is that someday we’ll orchestrate the right combination of elements into the right shape, and that will solve our problem and improve our lives so much that we’re freed up to start noticing, assessing, and attempting to fix entirely new, previously unrecognized maladies.
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