The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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Bonfire of the Insecurities
Next week is the traditional moment for new starts, new resolutions, improving ourselves. Let’s take this moment going in to talk about all the weird little things we worry about in life. The nagging mosquitoes that prick at us when we aren’t aware. Admit, and exorcise.
— My wife is extremely successful, and I do all I can to support her, but I worry sometimes I’ll end up like a penny-ante version of one of those 19th century art adjacent women who get biographies in the NYT Book Review as the muse and aide to a famous artist but her own works are all lost. I love her for who she is and I’m proud of her and I want her to be great at what she does, but in some circles I’m already more Mrs. FiveHour’s husband, even if I’m equally professionally successful in my own circles. I worry how I will succeed as a husband without compromising my self-respect in the long term.
— I’m a jack of all trades and a master of none, and I worry that I’m wasting my potential at anything through a desire to be well rounded. In general my aspiration is to be Heinlein’s Competent Man, but what if I’m just making myself universally INcompetent? I can’t stand the idea of being bad at anything, and that might keep me from ever being great at anything.
— I want to spend more time with my parents, more time with close friends, more time by myself, more time with my wife, more time with my dog, more time traveling, more time at home. Somehow there’s never enough.
— What opportunities have I missed? What will I miss if I don’t wake up and smell the coffee?
These are all absurd and minor in the grand scheme of things, but it’s what I need to be honest and acknowledge before moving forward.
You did ask for insecurities, so I'll list them. In general, I'd say I'm doing fine, but I'd be lying if I said that there aren't things that eat away at me pretty heavily (especially number 3).
1:
I'm currently involved with someone. Someone who I'm incredibly fond of, and who I would very much like to make things work with. His political beliefs and values differ very starkly from mine, though, so much so that they're probably irreconcilable. We've had discussions about various topics and my beliefs haven't changed one bit - his arguments are ones I've heard often before and don't find particularly convincing.
Apart from the obvious problem that poses, I'm aware that people are very capable of self-deception and essentially can delude themselves into adopting beliefs that are convenient to their purposes at the time, and while I would like to believe that my beliefs and values are strong enough that I wouldn't give them up without a principled reason to do so, the thought crops up in my mind again and again that I might compromise my principles for my own personal convenience without even knowing that I'm doing it. I'd view that as an utterly indefensible betrayal of my beliefs and values, and the mere thought that it could happen freaks me out quite a lot.
2:
This one is the polar opposite of your second insecurity - I'm very much not a jack of all trades, I have a tendency to specialise and as a result I have been able to become extremely good at quite a few things that I almost obsessively focus on. The downside to this is that my skillset is very unbalanced - my knowledge and/or skill in other domains can be fairly lacking, despite my generally-pretty-fast learning speed allowing me to compensate to some extent for it, and sometimes I do feel as if I should at least try to be a better rounded person.
3:
This is probably the most significant one and the one which I'm by far most reluctant to write - I have absolutely no clue where I'm going to take my life. For context, I was basically cajoled into taking a degree in a subject I didn't like by parents who thought it was a fantastic idea that I start university study at 12, and who placed an undue amount of pressure on me at a very early age. The cherry on top was that I ended up developing a painful and visible chronic disease which kept me from finding work for years and utterly destroyed my mental health, and now that the condition (and my mental state) is better I'm completely unsure what to do with myself.
At the moment I find myself trying to pick between going through another couple years of university to get a degree in something I like and only then trying to find work, or trying to get a job in my current field now. I'm currently favouring the second option and have made attempts to search for work and interview for roles in my current field, but still the idea that I'm potentially resigning myself to something I genuinely dislike is something that's very difficult to swallow. And being out of university for a few years hasn't helped my knowledge of my current field, nor does it help when I'm trying to find work and employers can pretty easily infer from my CV that there's been a large gap in my life that's unaccounted for. And this is all happening when the specialist I'm seeing has decided I should discontinue my current medication and there's a real risk of the chronic condition reemerging.
All of this isn't a minor setback, it's more akin to "unmitigated disaster". And trying to think about how to recover the situation when things have been so thoroughly derailed is frankly paralysing.
He's your man not mine, but have you tried getting to a deeper level, below what you both believe but why you believe it? I find I can accept people who believe things I don't more easily if I think they believe them for reasons I understand or respect. That can be so hard, when you feel like you've found the right person but some things don't work. All I'll say is that the delta between Right-Person>Wrong-Person can be so much bigger than almost anything else in your life that it outweighs almost everything else. The right partner is the most important decision you will ever make in your life.
Look, I figure everybody on here is basically like me so forgive me if I go astray, but I also found myself vocationally shipwrecked many years ago, unable to work in my field for reasons I won't go into. I got a "keep me alive" job to tide me over, something "beneath me" blue collar. In a year and a half I was running the place, and honestly it was the best job I ever had for joy. Above average intelligence and a modicum of conscientiousness is a superpower in the real world, go do whatever you want you can probably become at least moderately successful at it.
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