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How to Fight off Your Inner Critic
Your inner critic was always an outer critic
... who has been internalized. You're speaking to yourself as someone else once talked to you or made you feel.
You should acknowledge your failures and be happy to make amends. But you also have to stand back from this critic and question what they are doing in your mind. They don't have a right to walk as they wish through the rooms of your mind.
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Your inner critic
We almost all have a character inside our minds that tends to visit us late at night when we're very tired, telling us terrible things in order to destroy our self-confidence and self-compassion.
Too often, we don't know how to answer back. We forget that there might be any other perspectives. We let ourselves be beaten and sink into despair. However, we should prepare one or two things to shoot back at the critic when they next come calling.
Every story has two sides
You could tell everything as a tragedy, or you could tell an equally valid and far kinder story. You could say that you made some serious errors, as every human will, and you paid the price for them. Nevertheless, you tried to be good and loved a few people properly. Despite everything, your heart is in the right place.
The difference between hope and despair depends on the way of telling conflicting stories from the same facts.
Life's a struggle for everyone.
Stop comparing what you know of your deep self to the shallow front others advertise about their lives.
Everyone seems to know how to live, but you don't. However, you don't know. We may decide what to tell and what to hide. A few people may appear to have perfect lives, but only because you don't know them well enough.
No one knows the future
Despair presumes you know the rest of the story. You don't. Keep going; the loveliest things could happen all of a sudden.
So, if you think that things are never going to get better, stop. The truth is: you don't know.
The fear of being alone
Concentrate on the people with very big hearts. Be honest with them about your pain - they'll find their way to you.
Thinking no one could ever love you sounds very tempting, but that can't be the truth. You've suffered, and you're honest and can be kind. That's enough for someone to stick with you.
Thinking you're ugly
Maybe you think you're ugly. That might be true, but so are lots of people.
When you love them, you start to see their soul, and you love their character in them. You probably haven't thought about what most people you love look like.
Cut your life up into smaller pieces
Who cares where you will be in five years? Make it to the next meal and a nice bath. If nothing terrible happens in the next hour, that is a triumph. Celebrate the peaceful next ten minutes.
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Work, by definition, requires continuous effort, as completing anything of value, like attaining a college degree, building a business or writing a book, is a slow and steady process which spans mo...
When Doing Nothing Becomes Difficult
The mind seems terrified of the states of calm and relaxation as if work was a distraction to not let the mind come close to the worries and the existential queries. It saddles us with guilt and shame on the life we have lived, and the things that never materialized.
Doing nothing, it seems, becomes harder than doing any work that fills our time and keeps our mind engaged.
We Have To Keep Engaging Our Minds
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The maximalist philosophy of reading
The modern world equates the intelligent person will the well-read person. It's difficult to think of anyone arriving at any worthy insights without having read an impressive n...
Reading in the premodern world
The premodern world was obsessed with asking, "what is the point is of reading?" They had answers too.
- For example, the value for Christians and Muslims was holding up one book - the Bible or the Koran - as more important than anything else. This book was read repeatedly and with great attention.
- In the Ancient Greek world, one focused on just two books: Homer's Odyssey and his Iliad. These were all that was needed to impart the Greek code of honour and the best guides to action in military and civilian affairs.
- In the 18th century England, the ideal of reading was focused on Virgil's Aeneid - all a gentleman required to pass as cultivated. More reading was viewed as eccentric.
Why the modern world read so much
The modern world has adopted an Enlightenment mantra that states there should be no limit to how much we read because we read in order to know everything. We don't read to understand God or to follow civic virtue; we read to understand the whole of human existence.
This maximalist legacy of the Enlightenment idea of reading is present within the publishing industry, within the way books are presented to the public at school and in shops, and within our own guilty responses to the pressure to read more.
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