Knowing yourself

I feel like we ignore how "doing the best you can" includes what you are mentally capable of. You might be physically able to work 10 hours a day with no breaks, and you might think that it's the right thing to do and "want" to do it, but if you're not mentally able to do that then that still is not something you can do. Ignoring your mental capacity, or even worse blaming yourself for it, is never going to result in achieving the results you want to. I'm going to go off of my own life as an example, because my progress is the one I know most about: I had the cliche gifted kid burnout pipeline, I was good at academics and never really had to study until reaching a point where I actually had to but couldn't. I don't know if it was the disposition for depression that I inherited from my father or something else, but the stress of having to study but seemingly not being able to just "get up and do it" ate me up inside for the longest time. It felt like fighting with myself, within myself. It's a feeling that's hard to put into words. I knew deep down that I "didn't want to" study, but I kept telling myself to just get up and do it over and over again, yet even when I managed to sit and try reading a textbook I could never focus. It took me around three years to be able to understand that sitting down and forcing myself to study until I'm done with everything that "must" be done is not going to work, and it took me a year more to make peace with that and find a way to complete work without feeling like I was putting myself through torture. The answer was ridding myself of the stress, accepting that the part of me that doesn't let me just "get up and work" is just communicating my mental needs, and genuinely allowing myself breaks after shorter intervals of studying. Not blaming myself for being "lazy", not mentally beating myself up trying to get myself to work, it was the carrot and not the stick that ended up motivating me to not only do work but also to live. This also helped with my self-worth, I began to genuinely love myself and that was what allowed me to actually appreciate the people and things I have. Accepting your qualities and, instead of fighting them, working with them is crucial.

In my specific example, I was beating myself up over academics, but this could be about anything. And you don't necessarily have to be "beating yourself up" the way I was. This could apply to setting goals, for one. When setting a high goal that you could achieve, you could be the type that would want to "make sure" you achieve that goal, making the process a lot harder than it should be and in turn failing to complete the big picture while focusing too much on perfecting every little detail. Knowing you have the tendency to do such a thing, accepting it, and working with it is again going to at least be the biggest help if not the main solution. In this example, you could set lower goals that you know you will surpass as you have a tendency for perfectionism, come to terms with the possibility of not achieving the higher goal, and see if it works. It could be about romance, where you feel like your need for reassurance is what's ending your relationships. You could embrace that and look for a partner that matches your needs, instead of trying to make your partner match your needs and faulting yourself for failing to achieve the impossible which is to change another person.

Knowing yourself doesn't always mean you need to be fine with staying as you are. You might want to change, but even for change to occur you need to accept what you are at the moment and work with it towards changing. Denying a quality you have or just "trying" to not act that way doesn't fix or help anything, it simply ends with a big mixture of self-blame and low self-worth and failure. Your subconscious is still a part of you, and it honestly has way more control over most of what you do than your "conscious" self. And so, recognizing, embracing, and working with the subconscious parts of your self is the one and only way of allowing yourself to live properly.

It might take a while, or you might be the type to do it easily, but denying your own qualities or acting like they are not one with you is a habit that we all eventually need to get rid of. Life only really begins to feel like life once you take that step; and while it might just be one step in the seemingly endless and ever-evolving road that is self discovery, it is the biggest step you can take.