Doing the Next Best Thing

Making friends with your weakness

They say acceptance is the key to life. They also say that one of the hardest things to accept is our own flaws, but that we have to do it anyway. 

When people say ‘You have to accept yourself the way you are’ I think what they often mean is ‘You may not be perfect, but if you act like you are you’ll overcome those irritating weaknesses some day’.

And they’re not entirely wrong, either. You can go a long way with habit forming: “fake it till you make it”, feel-the-fear-and-do-it-anyway. I know because that’s what people who’ve gone a long way tell me on their podcasts.

But it takes an awful lot of courage, a ton of clearsightedness and a truckful of compassion to really look at yourself the way you really are and completely accept what you see. Anyone who’s gone there knows that ‘I love myself just the way I am’ isn’t a platitude, it’s a life’s work. 

Robert Christgau was once moved to say ‘Anyone who loves all men automatically is either slightly loony or doesn't know a whole lot of men’. I think the same applies to loving yourself: anyone who loves themselves with no trouble at all is unclear on what love means or doesn’t know themselves very well. 

Sometimes when I examine myself I notice a sense of profound weakness, of things being too much for me, that I find highly irritating and embarrassing - ‘Everyone else finds these things easy, why do I find them hard? What’s my problem?’ It takes time and effort to reassure myself that no, everyone else doesn’t find everything easy, and attacking myself for my flaws will turn all my big problems into huge ones. 

As I’ve worked on self-acceptance over the years I’ve noticed a strange paradox. Sometimes accepting a flaw weakens the hold the flaw has over me, making it easier to manage. Say I notice some jealousy in myself, and decide to apply mindfulness to it instead of judgement. After 10 or 15 minutes of accepting and "holding" the emotion I generally don't feel as jealous as I did when I started. 

But other times accepting a flaw means letting it win. That might mean overeating after a setback even though I know that medicating with junk food isn’t a long-term solution. Or it might mean rudely ignoring a message until I feel ready to answer it properly. Or it might mean feeling the fear and not doing it anyway, no matter what it might be, because the cost of doing it would be too high at this particular moment in time. 

THE GOOD, THE WORSE AND THE MUCH WORSE

I’ve come up with a three-tier system to explain this to myself. Say you're given a choice between doing A and B, which A being the "better" choice. Maybe A is going to a party you said you'd go to and meeting a lot of new people, and B is not going. 

1. The ideal thing to do is to go to the party.

But wait! Say that on the day of the party you find yourself overwhelmed by wave after wave of social anxiety. You realise that if you decide to go you'll get to meet a lot of new people, but the trouble is that you'll also meet a lot of new people.

2. The realistic thing to do is to give your overloaded system a break, stay home and take care of yourself. 

3. The worst thing to do is to stay home and tell yourself you should have gone. Or vacillate endlessly about whether you should go or not. Or try to make yourself go when you know it's a bad idea. Life is long. You'll have other opportunities. 

(1) is the best thing to do if you're not feeling anxious, or are feeling the sort of low-level anxiety that can reasonably be overcome. Up to a point, we thrive on challenges and attempting things that are a little bit beyond us. That's how we grow, say the people on the podcasts. 

But if your gut tells you that partying tonight would do more harm than good, the ideal thing to do is no longer the best thing to do. In situations like these the "next best thing" gets promoted to the "best thing". 

We’re imperfect and life is hard, so we’ll often only be capable of tier (2) behaviour. There’s a time for faking it ‘til you make it, and there’s a time for admitting to yourself how deeply flawed you are. Nothing puts an intolerable strain on your system like endlessly pretending to be better than you are. 

(2) options may not be ideal, but in a non-ideal world how can the best action always be the most ideal one? That would be imposing far too much artificial order on the messiness of reality. The world of (2) is the world of peace agreements, lie-ins and Nicorette patches. 

But the self-recrimination of (3) is always the worst option. (2) is recognising weakness, owning it and showing yourself mercy. (3) is fighting a losing battle with it, pretending it isn't there, blaming yourself for it, resenting its existence. 

A day full of virtue, rectitude and good works is (1), deciding you need a lazy day is (2), and drifting through the day thinking 'I must be productive', getting nothing done and hating yourself for it is (3). Tidying the whole house is (1), deciding you're up to tidying a bit of the house is (2) and refusing to tidy any of the house because you're not up to tidying all of it is (3). 

If we spend our time beating ourselves up for not being saints we might think we’re achieving something - ‘At least I’m aiming for the good’ - but we're actually making things worse. It's a short step from self-loathing to envy and resentment, and a very short step from those to an embittered life: ‘Look at the state of me. Why do things have to be this hard for me? They’re not hard for X. Man, I hate X’. 

WHAT'S THIS I SEE? LOOKS LIKE A EXAMPLE FROM MY OWN LIFE

When the lockdown began I wanted to be as conscientious about germs as possible. The problem? I hate housework even at the best of times. But I told myself that was no excuse for failing to keep my family safe, so I went into full-on medical research mode.

After weeks of reading germ control tips, comparing different cleaning products, spraying, wiping and obsessing over every shared surface I found myself exhausted to the point of paralysis. I hated both the tasks themselves and all the journalists who’d recommended them to me. 

Which left me with a difficult decision: (1) keep going as you are until you can't function any more, or (2) admit that the people who write those “protect yourself during lockdown” articles are better at this stuff than you. If that makes you a bad person who doesn’t care about their family, so be it.

Bit by bit, imperfectly, gradually, I chose (2). I generally find that decisions like this generate a certain amount of guilt but a much greater amount of relief, and the more I make them the more I trust my gut (‘this feels right’) over my brain (‘but what if…’). As usual, Aristotle got it right 2400 years ago: take virtues too far and they turn into vices. Follow the middle path.

Bit by bit, imperfectly, gradually, I'm aiming for the middle path. If I ignore my weakness, refuse to accept its power or overrate my ability to overcome it then it'll dominate me. But if I acknowledge it with compassion then I'll be able to cope with any challenge that comes my way.

Once I've stared down my own weakness the rest of the world becomes much easier to look at.