How I Learned to Stop Being So Insecure
“I’m not comfortable around you because I’m not comfortable around me.”
When I was 19-years-old, I set a countdown in my head.
It was a 5-year clock, counting down to the day that I planned to kill myself.
Intense? Yes. Over-dramatic? Certainly.
It doesn’t matter. At the time, I thought that this was a reasonable reaction to my life.
My world was driven by my fears and insecurities. I had undiagnosed anxiety, depression, and ADHD. I just thought I was a high-performing crazy person.
The thing is, undiagnosed mental illness is often much more than just a mental illness to the person struggling with it.
Undiagnosed mental illness is a worldview.
This is how I destroyed the worldview that ruled the first 23 years of my life.
“You’re overthinking it”.
The number of times that I’ve heard those 3 words in my life is embarrassing.
It’s embarrassing because sometimes, overthinking is what takes me to the next level. Overthinking gives me the power to analyze situations, develop solutions, and create strategies that other people might not see. Overthinking makes me a more self-aware and careful writer. Overthinking is also part of what makes me a good Jiu-Jitsu athlete.
Sometimes, overthinking makes me better.
However, that’s just half of the coin.
Overthinking is also what makes me think that my friends don’t care about me when I haven’t heard from them. It’s also what makes me work myself beyond my limits in the name of goals and perceived notions of my abilities.
Overthinking is what made me think I was better off dead.
I’m not comfortable around you because I’m not comfortable around me.
“I’m just not comfortable around _____ yet,” I used to say, to just about everyone in my life, about just about everyone in my life.
I blamed my inability to socialize with strangers on the fact that I wasn’t “comfortable” around them. I blamed my inability to pursue my passions on the fact that I wasn’t comfortable with my abilities. I wasn’t confident in my ability to publish good writing, win championships, or start a business. I wasn’t confident in my ability to do anything that would change my path.
For a long time, I blamed other people for my insecurities. I blamed my passions for being too saturated. There were “already too many other good writers”. Jiu-Jitsu was “too hard for me to become great at”.
Because of this limited mindset, my life was dull — even when it appeared exciting to others.
Life was dull because each moment was blurred by the fact that I was really just trying to make sure no one knew that I was insecure.
I was insecure about being insecure.
It was a vicious cycle. Here’s how I broke it.
First, you’ll have to punt the self-help crap.
This might be hypocritical because this article could be considered “self-help crap”, but I’m hoping you’ll bear with me on this one.
Most self-help prays on the insecurities of its consumers. If we all walked around accepting our flaws and the ways that our lives were going, there’d be no reason to have a self-help industry. Industries seek to fix problems, and self-help largely seeks to help the problem of mild-moderate mental illness (without actually treating the mental illness).
Self-help offers band-aids for people who’ve been stabbed with a dagger.
This doesn’t mean there is no value in self-help, but it does mean that, in my experience, most people are overdoing it with self-help stuff.
To truly get past my darkest insecurities, I had to get rid of all of the external voices that I was putting into my head.
I had to learn how to really think. I had to learn how I really think.
Sit by yourself… for a while.
Before 2021, I’d never had a breakup that actually affected my life much at all.
Every breakup I went through just felt like the end of the chapter in my life, but the breakup I went through this year felt like the death of my ego. I was in love with this woman and we spent months building things and working through things and figuring life out, and then all of a sudden, one day it all came crashing down.
All of a sudden, I had to rebuild my identity without using my partner as a crutch. I thought I was grown up, but this breakup forced me to actually grow up emotionally.
It made me realize that I couldn’t rely on anyone else to make me happy.
I couldn’t look to other people for the safety and security that I couldn’t give myself. I had to sit by myself and figure my shit out.
It took me about 6 months to get started.
I went on a social elimination diet.
For a long time, I feared loneliness. I didn’t like “being alone with my thoughts”.
I didn’t like myself, and I didn’t want to have to occupy my time with a person that I didn’t like. Emotionally, I was in a constant state of feeling strung out and exhausted because my life was dictated by the unstable emotions of unstable people in my life.
If someone was mad at me, I was mad at me. If other people were proud, I was proud. My entire day relied on the emotional highs and lows of the people around me.
This is an exhausting way to live your life and the way that I finally got past it was by removing myself from everyone in my life who was causing me stress. Even if the people weren’t “toxic”, I distanced myself. It was probably selfish, but for my sanity, I had to do this. I needed a scenery change.
I moved into a small, new place by myself. I got a new job. I started hanging out with new friends and I blocked out some of my old friends that made me feel like shit.
I spent a lot of time alone, and all of a sudden, one day, I realized that I actually didn’t mind being alone anymore. I liked it. I realized that I only wanted to spend time with people who wanted me there. I didn’t want to chase anyone. I didn’t want to impress anyone.
For the first time in my life, I was “doing me”, and that was all I wanted to do.
4 months into the experiment, I’m blessed and terrified
There was no bullshit in my approach to changing my life. I changed my life by changing my mind first. I worked on my mind for a long time.
All of the other stuff followed.
I didn’t read a book, go on a retreat, or buy a course. I didn’t have the money, time, or energy to invest in anything like that, and I was too insecure and too exhausted to do anything like that. I gave everything I could last year to my sport, my work, and my relationship.
Afterward, I had nothing left to give anyone.
Now, it’s a bit different.
However, despite the fact that my life-changing experiment of personal social reform is going well, I’m not free from insecurities. I still have to train my mind every single freakin’ day.
I still worry about people judging me sometimes. I still want to impress the cute girl I met at the Christmas party a few weeks back. I’ll still be bummed if it doesn’t work out.
However, this time, I can’t help but feel like something’s different. I can’t help but feel like I’ve actually made progress.
From the time I was 10 to the time I was 23, fear followed me around like a creepy stalker. I get that at 24, you’re not supposed to have the authority to really speak on “life advice”, but I have 14 years of experience with battling with a damaged mind.
If there’s anything I’ve learned in that time, it’s that I don’t want my life’s purpose to be fighting. I love fighting — I really do — but there’s more to life than just battles, obstacles, and achieving stuff.
“The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a patter of systems.” — Bruce Lee
As my mind begins to open, I’m free to an entirely new world of possibilities.
Closing Thoughts
I didn’t find self-improvement through self-help, I found it through philosophy.
Specifically, the book that I believe led me to a new space mentally was Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra — I’ve already written about that book many times in the past.
It’s ironic because eventually, Nietzsche went insane, but his work has allowed me to feel saner than I’ve ever felt in my entire life. By doing as Zarathustra did in the book and stepping away from as much of my surroundings as I could, I was able to truly clear my head for the first time ever.
A clear mind is the best remedy to fear and insecurity.