If I Can't Be Superman

There is an enormous amount of pressure placed on all of us by society, family values, friendships, relationships, and working peers. These “baselines” ravage our personal idea of productivity and worth, and for many of us that is a dangerous thing. If you are prone to intense introspection this could mean feelings of worthlessness or loss of hope in your ability to live a meaningful life. We cannot change the standards set forth by those groups I’ve just mentioned, but even if we could I don’t believe that would be the most effective solution. In my experience this change needs to happen internally; only then can we feel a continuous sense of relief in everything we do.

I’ve struggled with feelings of worthlessness for most of my adolescent and young-adult life. This buried sense of worthlessness was the catalyst that caused me to place an obscene amount of pressure on myself that then led to a cycle of self-doubt that inhibited me from achieving many of my goals. I know that I am not alone in that struggle, and that’s led me to ask myself what might have caused that distorted perspective.

Many of the books I read in middle school had something to do with kids my age possessing incredible powers and undertaking important quests with great responsibility. I watched television shows and movies about super heroes who were always at the center of the action. In high school, the use of social media rose rapidly, and it was easy to see only the best moments of everyone’s lives. In college it was all too easy to compare myself to everyone else and think, “What am I doing wrong?” Through all those years my perception was that greatness and heroic status were the only things to strive for. It felt as though it was expected, and while the alternative to that was not “wrong” it was still met with a feeling of insignificance. If you were the best then you were recognized and you were praised; if you were below-average you went unnoticed.

None of this is new. Through the ages of mankind societies have always looked up to a select few great people as role models to derive inspiration and the will to succeed. But it seems that in recent generations that healthy reverence of great people has been so blended in every aspect of life that it taints the “normal” perspectives developed in adolescence. Clearly this is not the case across the board, but I found that it was the source of my own personal feelings of worthlessness. I developed a very black-and-white way of thinking; I thought, if I can't be Superman then what worth does my life even have?

Ah, so now I’d identified it. I could see that my feelings of worthlessness were the result of years spent developing an unhealthy perspective of what it means to have a life worth living. I realized that I’d been making decisions like a pair of loaded dice; without direction, leaving things to chance, biased toward one outcome, and destined to lose as the one who rolls them always will.

So that was the piece buried deep within me that amplified the intensity of perceived societal pressures. But how did this incite the cycle of self-doubt and apathy that prevented me from reaching my goals? What was the progression of this unhealthy habit?

Thankfully, through a few sessions with my counselor, the answers to these questions and the cycle itself became clear to me:

1. The unhealthy world-view I mentioned above led me to place an enormous amount of pressure on myself to consistently do great and profound things, every day.
2. That discouraged me, and I told myself that I’d never be able to do that. I didn’t realize at the time that that pressure was ill-placed because that request of myself, or of anyone else, is so incredibly unreasonable.
3. Regardless, I became so discouraged that I opted to do nothing at all; because if I didn’t do anything, then how could I possibly fail? This, I now know, was a self-defense mechanism I developed within myself because of my fear of failure. I chose apathy because it was easy and safe.
4. Well, now I had managed to place a significant amount of unnecessary pressure and expectation upon myself and then proceeded to not even attempt to achieve anything because I feared my ability to do so. The only thing this did was create feelings of guilt and disappointment that made me think, “Maybe if I just put a little more pressure on myself to succeed then I would find the determination to do those great things.”

There we were, right back at Step 1 and no closer to achieving the many things I wanted to do.

It’s now been some time since I first mapped out that cycle, and each time I look at it I find it more and more ridiculous. However, it was a very real and dangerous cycle that I’d managed to justify within myself. I am sure that others find themselves there, and if you’re someone who does or even someone who can identify with any minor part of it, I’d like to share here how I was able to break free from it.

I started by trying to be more mindful of what was going through my head when I went to work on my goals. Were my thoughts mirroring anything in that cycle? If they were, and if I was indeed falling back into it, at first I did absolutely nothing but observe the way I felt. I simply let my mind do the same thing it had always done, except now I could say, “Oh, I see that this action or these thoughts are unhealthy. That’s something I’ll need to work on.” In the beginning I never put pressure on myself to fix these things all at once or right away.

After a few weeks of observing my thought process and identifying how often I fell into that cycle, I decided it was time to start fixing it. I’ve documented my use and my love of affirmations before, but I’m going to do so again now. I looked at the steps in the cycle that I wrote down and I created a positive affirmation for each one. Now that I was adept at identifying when I was falling into my own traps I could use the affirmations to pick myself up and move on in a different way. For example, when I heard myself think, I’ll never get any of this done and I’ll never do anything great, then I would say to myself, “It’s not a requirement of life to do great things all the time. I will get some of this done today, and I’m damn proud of myself for doing that.” These affirmations helped to give me a sense of control and empowerment. And it was effective because it came from within.

After spending so much time pairing the negative thoughts with the positive affirmations, and seeing that the positivity made me feel loads better than the negativity, I started to default to the affirmations instead of the negative thoughts I saw in that cycle. This was real progress, and I was extremely happy to have achieved that.

I’ll be honest, throughout this process I didn’t see a great increase in productivity. I was still procrastinating and I was still a little doubtful of my ability to perform, but what I saw was a change in my overall health. I woke up in a better mood. Even on bad days I found myself putting a positive twist on everything. I felt lighter, mentally, and I found that I had a greater capacity for patience with myself and others. That process of relieving the pressure I put on myself, and breaking free from that cycle of doubt and disappointment, made me happier to be alive and it let me see the worth in even the most simple of tasks.

If there’s one thing to take away from all this it’s the understanding that a lot of the pressure we feel comes from society is amplified by our own attitudes toward ourselves. Yes, society and family and friends and peers place a lot of unseen, external pressures on us throughout our entire lives, but we don’t need to convert those external pressure to internal ones. We should be able to recognize those pressures and those feelings of worthlessness and say to them, “I see you, you are there, but I am worth it and I am doing a fantastic job. Even if it does not meet the often unrealistic expectations I set on myself.” All of that can be done within one’s self, and in my experience it only breeds happiness and the ability to live freely and in concert with a healthy self-image.