What does it take to get your life back in order?
Your 6:15 AM alarm goes off, and you impulsively hit the snooze button. 1 hour later, you’re still in bed, feeling unmotivated and unwilling to get up. It’s a Thursday, a weekday where you have to get to work. But nothing feels interesting enough to get you out of bed. You can’t remember the last time you looked forward to a day. Or the last time something challenging excited you enough to face it. It’s been weeks since your last workout session, and you don’t like who you see in the mirror. What worries you is not the extra kilos but the lack of desire or motivation staring back at you. It’s been weeks, maybe months, and you still can’t seem to get out of this state.
Identity
There are tons of reasons people feel down. But for you, it’s a conflict of identity. Your actions do not reflect who you say you are or who you want to be.
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony — Mahatma Gandhi.
Realising it’s a conflict of identity, you look for the options available to you. You either change your actions to match who you say you are or change who you say you are to match your actions.
The problem, however, is that you don’t like your actions. You’ve done the same things in the past, and they’ve never given you any real joy. The only time you’ve been at peace was when you lived differently — when you lived the life of who you say you are. And that means there really isn’t a choice. You have to change your actions. But then there’s a catch.
Truth
Looking back to when the slump started, you realised you made a mistake. You did something that conflicted with who you said you were. At the time, you had a choice to make. Come clean about what you did, admit the mishap, and work hard not to repeat the mistake. Or pretend it never happened and ignore it. Unfortunately, you chose the latter. You pretended it never happened. The only problem was, it did happen, and hiding it meant lying to everybody else. That was the beginning of the double life.
The longer you kept the pretense, the more you fed the beast, and that allowed the mistakes to repeat themselves. And as you made more mistakes and kept preserving the lie, the downward spiral continued. It’s an endless cycle of guilt.
So, what does it take to get your life back in order?
It’s not a list of steps. It’s about getting out of the cycle of guilt with the truth and reconciling your actions with your identity.
It’s a Friday. Just like your recent mornings, you struggle to get out of bed. You still don’t like who you see in the mirror, but you won’t have another morning like this. Today, you decide to get your life back in order. Your first step is to decide who needs to know the truth. Just like depriving fire of oxygen, confession cuts off the supply for the double life. After telling the truth, you become free and have nothing else to hide.
It’s Saturday. This is your first happy morning in a long time.
