No One Is Coming To Rescue You: Lessons In Self Reliance

Often, I think of the person that I expected myself to be by this age. All of it is just naive imaginations of what being a young adult would entail, yet I can’t seem to shake the funhouse mirror image reflecting back at who I’ve actually grown to be. Swept up in a deafening chorus of comparisons, I find myself paralyzed by my own hopes and hypotheticals.

As independent as I like to believe that I am, there is a semi-subconscious confession that pings around my head: I’ve been secretly waiting for someone to come and save me.

So I decay here, on the clock, waiting for some life-changing acting role to fall into my lap, or for some influential mentor to take me under their wing. I hide crossed fingers in the back of my mind, desperate that I won’t have to do the heavy lifting. Where has this gotten me? Am I destined to grow fatigued under the weight of my resentment? Towards a world that, by my own hallucination, has left me in this tower with my mental dragon?

Dealing with mental health issues for almost a decade now, I’ve dipped my toe into a plethora of coping mechanisms. Whether it be meditation, medication, journaling, or reading the tea leaves– my grubby little hands have touched upon it. However, the most refreshing amount of clarity that I’ve ever found from any perspective shift over the years has been from this reminder:

“It’s up to me, and only me, to be someone that I can live with.”

Seems like a simple, even basic mentality, right?

Well, this came to me following a severely stressful time in my life where I was receiving a metric shit-ton of hate messages online. Being the people-pleaser that I’ve been my whole life, this was a painful exposure to the reality of my secret “save me” dream: that it was impossible to make everyone happy without only getting self hatred out of the deal.

For the first time, I had to be confident that I was in the right almost entirely alone. No one would be there to call off the mob. No one except my own mind.

It hit me hard, don’t get me wrong. I fell into a deep depression, erratically dangling between the urge to self destruct and run away. Yet this, too, taught me something very valuable. I met myself again for where I actually was.

So consumed with a malleable idea of who I was supposed to be working towards becoming, I had lost sight of all that I had already become in the process. I had become a liar, of sorts. So ready to let any passing soul guide my lost one, I defaced my personality in hopes of fitting in. I was a hitchhiker, trying to catch a ride with my hands in my pockets.

To shift that mindset, and be able to look at my worries and goals through the perspective of “This is what I want to do, and it’s a solo project” has been entirely transformative. Like ripping off a bandaid, the pain will pass as soon as I wince and bear it.

There can definitely be an impulse to see this as a negative phrase, or one that denounces the merits of teamwork and support systems… but that’s a whole different machine. What I mean is not to “Go it alone”, or “Never let people in on your life”. I’ve also tried this method, admittedly, but with horrifically lonely and unproductive results.

What I really mean is that in order to get what you want out of life, you must only rely on yourself to take the action and make the changes necessary to make that happen. You get out of life what you give into it, so how much are you willing to give?

I may not have been able to know who I would be at this age as a child, but I did know who I wanted to be. All that I didn’t see coming was that I would be the one to come and save myself. So day by day, I slay the dragon just a little bit more, and inch myself towards freedom.

Are You A People Pleaser?

• Yes!
• Yeah, but I don't want tp be one
• Nah
• I Hate People