An Argument With Myself

There are two people in my head, and I'm beginning to think neither of them is making my life particularly easy.

One wants to do something extraordinary with her life. She wants to build something meaningful, be good at what she does, push herself, and see how far she can go. She has ideas, plans, and a picture of the person she wants to become.

The other keeps asking who she thinks she is.

What if she isn't as capable as she thinks? What if she puts herself out there and nobody cares? What if she tries her hardest and still turns out to be ordinary?

The frustrating thing is that I don't know which one I believe more. I want so much for myself, but I can also find a hundred reasons to doubt that I can have it. I want to be the kind of person who follows through on what she starts, but I keep finding ways to get in my own way.

I see it in the smallest things, too.

For a while, I was consistent with my workouts and food. I genuinely enjoyed it. I felt stronger, I could see the changes in my body, and I was proud of myself. It wasn't something I had to force myself to love. I liked how I felt when I showed up for myself.

Then, somewhere along the way, I stopped showing up the same way.

A missed workout became a few. Long walks and runs became things I'd get back to eventually. I started eating whatever I felt like, telling myself I was managing my cortisol, that life was short, that I deserved to enjoy the little things.

And I do believe in enjoying life. I don't want to turn every meal into a calculation or every day into a test of discipline. But I know when I'm making a conscious choice to enjoy myself and when I'm using that argument to avoid doing something I know matters to me.

The part that bothers me isn't that I have an ice cream or skip a workout. It's how easily I can talk myself out of something I genuinely want, and how difficult it can be to find my way back once I've stopped.

I do the same thing with work. I get excited about an idea, spend time thinking about it, planning it, imagining what it could become. I get close to putting it out into the world, and then I slow down. I find other things to do. I tell myself I need more time, more clarity, a better plan.

Sometimes I probably do need those things. But sometimes I wonder if I'm just trying to avoid the moment when the idea stops being something that exists in my head and becomes something people can judge.

Because as long as I haven't really tried, I can keep believing I have the potential to do something great. I don't have to find out whether I'm actually capable of it.

I hate admitting that. I want to be brave enough to try, to fail, to learn, and to try again. I want to stop treating every possible failure as if it might tell me something permanent about who I am.

But I think I've spent a long time believing that what I achieve will tell people who I am. Maybe it will finally make them take me seriously. Maybe it will prove that I was capable of more than they thought. Maybe it will prove something to me, too.

Growing up, my brother was the one my parents had big plans for. They wanted him to become a heart surgeon. They had a picture of what his future could look like, and it was something ambitious. With me, it always seemed to come down to getting married to someone.

I don't remember being angry about it. I think I just believed that was how things were. Maybe they saw something in him that they didn't see in me. Maybe they thought I wasn't capable of much more. Whatever the reason, I started believing it, too.

But I wanted more. I wanted them to want more for me. Not just good grades or for me to do better than someone else, but an actual life of my own. Something I could work towards, something that was mine. I wanted them to believe I could do something extraordinary, too.

I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted to be believed when I said I could do something. And I wanted to feel loved without having to compete for it.

I think a part of me has spent years trying to prove that they were wrong about me. To show that I could be more than what they seemed to expect. But the strange thing is that even while trying to prove them wrong, I carried their expectations with me. I wanted to do something extraordinary, yet I kept questioning whether I was capable of it.

It's a difficult way to live, wanting to prove that you're more than people thought you were while still wondering if they were right.

I recognise that voice now. The one that questions everything I do, that reminds me of all the things I haven't achieved, that makes me feel as though I'm running out of time. It sounds like my own voice, but I know some of the things it says. I've heard versions of them before, from people whose opinions mattered to me.

And maybe that's what makes it so difficult to argue with. At some point, I stopped hearing it as someone else's opinion and started hearing it as the truth.

I don't want to spend the rest of my life trying to prove my worth. I don't want every ambition to become a way of settling an old score. I want to build things because I care about them, to challenge myself because I want to see what I'm capable of, and to enjoy the life I'm building along the way.

But I also don't want to use self-acceptance as another excuse to settle. I know myself well enough to recognise when I am being unnecessarily hard on myself, but I also know when I'm avoiding something difficult. I don't want to confuse the two.

I want to be kinder to myself without giving myself permission to keep breaking promises I make to myself. I want to be ambitious without making my achievements the measure of my worth. I want to be disciplined without feeling as though one imperfect day means I've failed. And I want to try things without needing to know in advance that I'll be good at them.

I don't know how to hold all of that at once.

Some days, I think I need to push myself harder. Other days, I wonder if I've spent so much time criticising myself that I've made it harder to do anything at all. I keep looking for the right balance, the point where I can hold myself accountable without making myself feel small.

Maybe there isn't a perfect balance to find. Maybe I just have to learn to recognise when I need a push and when I need a little patience.

I still want to do something extraordinary with my life. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I want to see what I can build, what I can learn, and what I'm capable of becoming. I don't want to shrink those desires just to protect myself from disappointment.

I just wish wanting something and working towards it didn't have to involve so much arguing with myself.

Maybe I can be unsure of myself and still try. Maybe I don't have to resolve every doubt before I take the next step. Maybe I can stop treating my life like a test I have to pass before I'm allowed to believe in myself.

I wish that felt like an answer. For now, it's the best I've got.