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The Art of Self Sabotage

There's a fine line between resistance and resilience

By Shae MorenoPublished 4 years ago 3 min read
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The Art of Self Sabotage
Photo by Silvestri Matteo on Unsplash

"I freaking did it again!" I screamed at myself after realizing I had fallen back into that pattern. Not just with this particular thing, but with everything. I've grown extremely apathetic and, for me, that's detrimental. I'm a college student, and I had a paper due yesterday. I told myself 'Oh, let's just finish it tomorrow and take the 10% dock for turning it in late.' Yeah. Okay. It honestly was not hard to agree to that. Today, I told myself 'Screw it! Just turn in the pages you have and take the F.' Okay. Again, wasn't hard to agree to. Except about five minutes after I submitted what I had, I realized I had done it again. Self sabotage at its finest. Pretty much what I am best at.

I have a long history with saying 'Let's just take the F.' for schoolwork. For example, I started college when I was 18, but didn't complete a college class until I was 25. I have been successfully in school for a little over a year, and this is the first time since returning that I've even had that thought. I thought we were done with this. I blamed it on the teacher at first, then the coursework. The class is online and the only assignments were 7 discussions and 3 papers. Easy. However, you have 4 books to read; 2 textbooks, The Odyssey and The Aeneid. I have a hard enough time keeping up with one books worth of reading let alone 4! And on top of that, each discussion is based around another excerpt from something the teacher chose, so we don't have any interactions based around what we've read or learned or the majority of the books at all, we write papers about them. Don't get me wrong, I can write a paper, I am an English major after all, but the lack of engagement was almost like a shut off for me.

I find it very discouraging to have had these thoughts after doing well for so long. And something that I've had to reconcile as an adult is that it is no one's fault but my own. I could've reached out to the professor, I could've been more active in class discussions, I definitely could've tried harder to read the material for class. I know what my learning style is, and I have to be engaged in order to care let alone learn, so why can't I do it myself?

I'm sure there are a lot of things behind my constant self sabotage. I know I've quit jobs before, jobs that I really liked, because I didn't want someone being better at it than me. I've given up on classes that I'm good at and interested in because the professor wasn't what I expected. I let fear get in my way. I let anxiety get in my way. I let myself get in the way. And what is it that I'm afraid of? Failing? Sometimes you have to fail to succeed, and I know that. Am I afraid of succeeding? Maybe. Because once you succeed, then what? I always think back to Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, "The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don't know what you're afraid of." You're afraid and don't know what you're afraid of. That's it.

It's not enough to recognize when I've self sabotaged when it's over with, I need to recognize it when it's happening. I need to be more aware. I guess, in a sense, I am aware of it; but I've gotten very good at surrendering to whatever it may be that I believe is right at the time. I need to change that. How can I change that? A lot of work, I assume.

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About the Creator

Shae Moreno

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