“Yeah but your lifestyle is fucked up.”
“You’ll still be here in 5 years.”
2 monumental sentences said to me on my 29th birthday this weekend.
Phrase 1 means that my approach to life is all wrong, and that’s why I haven’t been satisfied with it. I plug in my emotional holes with materialism and low effort tasks but the core of my being is well aware of that, so I cannot continue living that way if I want to be happy. I’ve realized that frugality in lifestyle will directly lead to my happiness, as odd as that may seem to the poor kid in my past that I run from, but still ultimately embodied. No longer is that the case, no longer will I hurt myself by fragmenting my soul into the material objects around me.
Phrase 2 isn’t a wake-up call, but a call to action. It’s a genuine fuck you to the people who don’t believe in me, the people supposedly closest to me. They don’t believe in me, they just want to drag me down to their level, they just want to believe in their own egos, and prop themselves up at my expense.
Fuck them. The problem is that these people perceive that I need them when I ultimately don’t, but they think I do because I do rely on them. This is my fault, because of my tendency to always look for the easier, more risk-averse route.
The 29th birthday has passed, the end of my 3 year plan has arrived. The foundation is built, I see it around me. I just haven’t been able to elevate myself yet. I am frustrated with myself, but I need to be more compassionate with myself because Rome was not built in a day and I have come a long way in 3 years’ time. I just have so much more to do, so much more to accomplish, and I am frustrated that I haven’t been able to. I need to be patient, focused and steadfast to reach my next stage in life.
What is the next 3 year plan? Full, complete independence. It will not take 3 years for me to accomplish that, but it will take 3 years for me to find the right girl to start my life with. It will take 3 years for the world to see me as the man that I see myself as. It won’t take 3 years to accomplish the things I want to accomplish like moving out, finding a girl, moving to a new country, and ascending in my career but it will take 3 years for me to be able to look back at myself at the age of 32, and see that I successfully kept at it and became the man I set myself to be.
I’m reading the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People and habit 2 stresses to ‘begin with the end in mind’. What is the end I have in mind for myself?
I want to be a great father. When I die, more than anything I want my children to celebrate me as having set them up for success in ways that my father never did. I need to let go of my father once and for all.
To be a great father, I need to find a great woman. To find a great woman, I need to be a great man.
What does it mean to be a great man?
Kind. Empathetic. Responsable. Trustworthy. Strong. Diligent. Proactive. Wise. Courageous.
This is what I am. This is what I want to be. This is what I need to be.
With these 9 (for now) values, I can use this to base myself and establish my value system, my philosophy, my constitution as Covey says. I live by my religion but I must live by the principles most important to that religion, to myself, to the ones universally understood across all walks of life.
I want to be a great man. I want to find a great woman.
The woman I am seeing currently isn’t that for me. This isn’t to say that she wouldn’t be for someone else, but I’m not convinced.
Superficially speaking, she’s not attractive enough. It’s a fucked up thing to say and think but I can’t help it. She’s the least attractive woman I’ve ever been with, but she’s also the smartest and the one with the best disposition. She has great qualities, but my immaturity won’t let me focus on that because I can’t get past the dick-measuring between myself and other men.
I feel like this situation with her is in conflict with what I envision myself as being, a man of principle. I feel like I’m almost fundamentally betraying myself by enabling this dynamic further, but I do it because of my own insecurities and lack of satisfaction with myself. I’m enabling this situation because I myself don’t want to be alone, but at the same time I do and it’s put me into this metaphorical box where my indecision is costing me my time.
Honestly, she has so many great qualities that I value. Most of my problems with her are superficial, but at the same time I feel like they’re an indicator of something within that I don’t want to be with. Ultimately I want someone with a similar approach to life as myself, including the way I present myself. I don’t see that in her unfortunately, and it frustrates me that that feels like a dealbreaker for me because a part of me feels like it shouldn’t.
My insecurities are killing me, and waving around a ‘trophy girl’ isn’t going to be the solution to that problem. I need to start from within before I can look outwards. I need to accept my fear of rejection, I need to disregard the perfectionist mindset that was forced on me because of a father that I was never able to satisfy, and I need to make peace and let go of the pains of my past because they are still affecting my future.
Every woman in my life that I’ve ever been with, except one, was not the woman I’d want to be with and instead was just the result of circumstance compounded with significantly greater efforts from the women to get me versus the other way around. I always felt like I was compromising myself in one way or another, except for that one girl from the beginning of this year. My fear of rejection is one that I need to overcome, and it’s not a coincidence that the only girl in my entire life that I was ever satisfied by just so happened to be the one that I chased and embraced the possibility of rejection with. She rejected me too but ultimately it was a beneficial experience and I did sleep with her.
I see so many guys that I’m better than in every way shape and form, be with absolute stunners. What I feel is ultimately preventing me from a psychological standpoint is the fact that I just don’t see myself as an independent man because I’m not fully independent. I can be, but instead I’ve chosen the easier lifestyle and this is the consequence I have to pay.
My self-conception has been drastically affected by taking this poison pill, and I’m not happy as a result. I know deep down that my lifestyle truly is fucked up, and I’m not living the way I want to. I need to embrace the struggle, not run from it.
This is what I need to create for myself. The end of my next 3 year plan is one where I can look at myself in the mirror and without a shadow of a doubt, state that I’m the man.
