I Suck Sometimes

We weren’t allowed to say “suck” when I was a kid. I’m not totally sure why, but I imagine it has something to do with the very conservative purity culture atmosphere of my household, or maybe my parents just thought it was rude. I don’t know, but sometimes I suck, meaning, sometimes I do shitty things.

It took some time for me to be able to say this about myself from a more objective perspective. I’m not talking about habitual self-loathing or cutesie omg I’m the woooorst, but from a healthy place of being able to look at the shadow side, the dark side of myself and say, “Yeah, screwed the pooch on that one.” (Oh yeah, we weren’t allowed to say “screwed” either, which seems more obvious to me why we weren’t).

When we have unhealthy introspective patterns, change cannot happen. We get stuck in a cycle of negativity, shame, or flat-out ignoring ourselves. We get stuck because unless there is truth without shaming, there’s no real way for us to move forward or bump ourselves out of the ruts.

For a while, I had a deep unconscious thought that I was a disappointment. I didn’t even realize that I was playing that soundtrack in the background until I was in a therapy session and I just blurted it. I almost gasped I was so surprised that was in there. I thought about that a lot in the coming weeks, and then I made a very simple shift from “I’m a disappointment”

to

“Sometimes I disappoint people.”

Do you hear how significant that shift is? It’s not ignoring that sometimes I do shitty things. It’s not glossing over the fact that sometimes, people are massively disappointed in my choices. What it is doing though is removing the shame that says I AM that thing (character: a disappointment) to I DO disappointing things (behavior). There was a lightness to it that helped me see myself more clearly.

What if we took these thoughts:

I am anxious.

I am fearful.

I am a failure.

I am unsuccessful.

and reframed them to:

I have anxious thoughts.

I fear things.

I fail.

I don’t always succeed.

Reframes help break the behavior from the identity. If you’re having anxious thoughts, the simple observation of, “Oh, this is just an anxious thought” may sound simplistic and silly, but for me, it helps me become the watcher/witness/observer of my thoughts instead of getting stuck. I stop beating myself up mentally and open up the beautiful passage of curiosity.

Curiosity is the best antidote to shame.

Sometimes I do sucky things. And that’s okay.