As we get older, our natural resignation coats life in grey. Obligations, stale routines, and life’s barriers make us forget how colour and meaning were once all that filled our day. We tend to feel more closed off, cynical, defeated in spirit before our time. More susceptible to letting time slip by. In other words, the gap grows between the life you want to live and the life that wants to live in you.
Growing responsibilities get you into a rhythm — not necessarily one you love, but one you feel comfortable repeating — and over time, those contours aligning your daily routine become more detailed and deep-rooted.
As George Bernard Shaw perceptively noted, “We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing”. It captures how self-sabotage and our inner critic are an enemy of peace that gradually extinguishes our spark.
You can’t avoid life’s plethora of barriers and challenges and situations that expose your weaknesses. And each time you do encounter hardship, your inner critic will come alive, and you must decide — do you feed it, dwell on your perceived weaknesses, and let it keep you distracted from having to go through big feelings or ask big questions? Do you let the neurotic mind control how you’re feeling? Or do you address the root of your self-sabotage and call it out? Do you push back on your limiting beliefs and own everything already there, including the insecurities and uncertainties?
You have a unique set of gifts: essential nature, vocation and voice. You can’t fake or silence them. But the hardest thing you can do is articulate or convince yourself of these qualities. And it doesn’t matter who else you convince if you cannot convince yourself.
Life can get messy. We spend a lot of time in our heads, creating unnecessary chaos as if it’s an addiction. Everything good comes with internal resistance as we let our doubts and defences against vulnerability suffocate us. For some, this has been happening for a long, long time. The idea of quietening the mind feels like a distant glimmer of optimism.
But even years of self-sabotage and heavy-mounted internal resistance are reversible. You can push back against the inertia gradually ageing your perspective and limiting your potential to live the life that your inner self is screaming inside to be lived.
The work starts here, and you need to get to it.
Take this from Heather:
This is where that work starts: I want you to respect how you’re wired. Your wiring is part of your reality, and it’s not just a liability. It’s a form of sensitivity that has made your life richer and more vibrant up to this moment. Your wiring has enhanced your ability to form deep connections, to show up for other people when they’re in crisis, to speak honestly about your feelings, to honor the differences between yourself and others. A lot of your ambition and your drive come from this wiring. There is plenty to celebrate about turning out exactly the way you have.
The earthquakes of self-sabotage can help you learn to grapple with reality in ways many people cannot. And the more you can savour your wirings and emotions instead of treating them like overbearing threats, the more you welcome the sensations of your inner critic and work with it instead of against it to recover and create your true nature.
You’re here to feel good, to spread your vibrant energy around and to love and be loved. We all struggle to feel happy at times and we all struggle to always be peaceful and calm. But that’s how we are built — in the same way that it’s also impossible for us to sabotage everything.
Remember: you are here to enjoy who you are, to teach other people the same, to stop waiting for a different life, and to make sure the life that your inner self wants to live is the same as what you live on the outside. Your mind is a bad translator of what your body is feeling. So quieten it when it tries to speak louder cave the walls around you. Allow yourself to find the solid ground inside you and trust what’s at your core.