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In this episode, I discuss the crushing power of feeling responsible for all of the worlds problems. We go into how we are not meant to know all of it all of the time and how helpless it feels when the influx is never ceasing. You were not meant to do it all. Let go and lean into your life, responding to what’s before you with love and gratitude. You are enough. Enjoy!
TRANSCRIPT:
As with most of my topics, this week I am talking about something that organically came up for me and struck a chord. It is something that I think is very important and something I am trudging my way through as I share this.
I was on social media recently and read what looked like a shared screenshot that talked about the very idea that we can’t do it all. But I really loved the way the concept was presented. It was presented, not in an attacking or defensive manner, but from the perspective of gratitude. It was in a tangent form essentially that, for example, thanked the guy that picks up trash on the beach after a surf, but isn’t aware of male suicide rates. It said “to the positive Instagram influencer who hasn’t cultivated a plastic-free lifestyle, thank you.” It goes on to cover such a vast array of subjects, opening the readers eyes to an idea we all internally battle, and more and more in our culture and current age.
There are countless issues; countless areas that need action, that are thirsty for reform and for people to help make change. There are vitally important movements going on everywhere, and there are a lot of problems… Problems that pile up in our minds, on our hearts, and overwhelm our gut with shame and guilt when we allow our thoughts to run wild and thus feel responsible to change it all… to do it all… to fix it all.
For those of us that suffer with perfectionism, this is an area where we so very easily get filled with shame and fear and guilt; often without even knowing it, as with many thoughts. We feel responsible and we want to do it all and the pressure can crush us internally if we aren’t careful. We are about perfecting things… and fixing things can be a part of that; the fact that we want to fix it all and can’t do it all leaves us feeling helpless, afraid and in a puddle of shame feeling we can’t do anything because we will fail to do it all; shame for knowing about wrongs and not doing something, or everything, not being the hero we think we should be for all of it and for everyone. Yes, I exaggerate slightly… but is this really an exaggeration. I don’t know.
This is an area we already struggle with and something I have actively been working on. The influx into our awareness of this mass of problems needing solutions never stops entering our awareness from TV and social media, it comes at us from every direction with no breaks; with compounding pressure, heaping onto our shoulders what feels like endless problems that we must change about the way we live, endless injustices or dangers we think is up to us to make the whole world aware of and open their eyes, and the seemingly infinite ways we in theory can and feel like we should be making a difference.
In this mental space that we find ourselves in, how is it that we can find space in our minds to be at peace and yet balance what is important. How can our minds manage all of this weight and burden and pain and find contentment and gratitude in our lives and growth toward who we are trying to live our lives as; toward the best version of ourselves. Amidst this struggle, how is it possible to find the peace and joy needed to pursue passions and explore creativity that bring deep fulfillment. When the list continues on and on, we have no space to breathe let alone do any of the other things that make for a life that even allows for someone to become a passionate difference maker.
This is something I know very well, but until I read this aforementioned post on social media I had not realized how much I had dismissed this in my thought world, putting it on the back burner as something I would work on later… and I had not realized how, while it was there and I was subconsciously still aware of it, the shame and guilt for not fixing the worlds problems was building and building. I realized how much pressure I feel. How debilitating it can be. And how important this topic is for us to ponder, and wrestle with and question.
Before I go deeper into my thoughts on the matter, which are just that (MY THOUGHTS), Let me make clear one thing; I am not saying we do not need to take on the world’s problems. I am not saying we need to leave it for the next person, or the next generation or to turn a blind eye to it all.
I am not at all saying that because we each individually can’t do it all, we should instead do nothing. This is not the topic at all for me here.
What I am saying is that the way this builds in our lives and takes over our minds, is not productive. What I am saying is that all of the world’s problems don’t rest on your shoulders alone, and just becoming aware of the problems doesn’t transfer responsibility to you or me, and thus the guilt of these problems still existing at any point in the future and of course today does not transfer onto your shoulders or mine. This is simply too overwhelming and a recipe for failure. If we take responsibility for fixing everything that we learn about all of the time, then we will never be able to get out from under the weight of all of it to make any actual differences in the world. We will be overwhelmed with fear of what it all means and shame for whatever role we haven’t yet played and feel we should have or have unfortunately played and didn’t know it. It is overwhelming and truly depressing to learn more and more about troubling things in the world and sometimes the magnitude that is so big it feels irreversible and like we can do nothing… we feel helpless.
You can take action, and you can promote change. This is good and wonderful and should happen; BUT, you can’t do this with ALL of the things and you shouldn’t think that way. AND here is a key, not ALL of it is for YOU to do. The problems aren’t all for YOU alone to fix. This is a good place to remind ourselves over, and over, and over again that we are not God. And thinking we should play God always gets us into trouble, in my opinion. We need to pay attention to the story that is running on this topic within our minds and we need to protect our minds from thoughts that create this kind of handicap… this kind of helplessly overwhelming despair.
I know for me; this is deeply and unequivocally true. When I am on social media, particularly Facebook, and hearing news often, I feel an immediate shift toward anxiety. My chest and neck tighten, my shoulders draw inward, and my stomach knots up. I become wrapped into my head, into the stories, unable to see them for what they are (thoughts that are running in my brain unconsciously) and I am drawn out of the moment that I am actually in, unable to be able to be present. Unable to engage in where I am and find peace and joy. My body is taken into the fight or flight stress response and I can’t settle. I struggle to even feel what’s going on, and it takes over my mood and my thoughts. Because of the overwhelming feelings produced by thinking about all that is going on that is causing pain, and the thoughts that tell me that I am responsible and must fix it, I have a hard time even engaging with my thoughts and become hyper-reactive to the people in my life and my actual life. Everything that happens is interrupting my thoughts and adding to the mental stress of which I already feel overwhelmed, and I just react by snapping in response to all of it. I become impatient, rude and offendable. I become irritated and feel like crying or screaming. I struggle to sleep well and want to numb out constantly to distract myself from how it all feels inside. This is how it feels for me when I am overwhelmed by the problems of the world, and feeling responsible for all of it… and this happens for me easily when I go on social media and listen to the news regularly… I am sure you can relate at least to some of this, and if so, it’s not something wrong with you. As a person with empathy and integrity, we want to help when there is a need… but it’s in our faces constantly and it’s just too much.
The truth is, we are not built for the mental processing of all of the world’s problems all of the time without filter or breaks. It is a more recent phenomenon to be faced with a constant and never-ending influx of problems that feel dire and need solving. Our brains want and need to solve problems. It feels like we are failing when we don’t solve the problems because they don’t just go away… they sit there, looming over our heads almost haunting us with fear and shame, and because we can’t solve all of them, and some of them are at least partially beyond our own individual control, we start to feel completely helpless. This breeds fear and more fear and feeds the spiral that continues to cycle us downward into this anxiety and overwhelm and even depression. As a society, there is no filter for these, so we need to proactively take action to protect our minds from the constant invasion of compelling and fear producing thoughts.
When we try to do it all, we will do less because it feels as though the walls are crashing in around us and it feels as though nothing we can do will really make a difference… and the thoughts that produced the feelings of responsibility for all of it are the thoughts that will breed shame for not doing it all. When we try to do it all we are acting in reaction to thoughts that we need to do something for each thing we are made aware of. We feel an insurmountable level of social responsibility, and it is overwhelming.
I talk a lot about motherhood, and this is not the only way you can relate here, so I hope you can see that even if you do not have children. A lot of the stories I tell, to relate to the topics I am discussing, have to do with the shifts that have happened to me during parenthood, but even though this is where my paradigm shifts have often taken place, this doesn’t mean that this is the only place they are relevant or that I am discounting experiences not related to parenting. The shifts that happened for me during parenting experiences, might have happened to others without having kids of course in different ways. But the past 8 years of my life have been chiefly dominated by parenting experiences, and thus those are naturally many of the experiences that I will draw from.
Anyway, when I was first diving into my role of motherhood… that is, when my eldest son was young and I was still learning to navigate through the waters of perfecting it all (hahaha)… By the time he was about 9 months old, running around like crazy and getting into everything, I was already in way over my head. There were many more topics to figure out than I had even imagined. There was nutrition, power struggles, sleep, natural baby products, healthy remedies for common ailments, how to react and respond to his behaviors in general, parenting and parenting WITH my husband and on and on and on. There was socialization, and play, and encouraging development, along with all of the baggage that I still held onto from my own childhood. Around this time, I heard a series of talks online about health and on mothering naturally, and on raising healthy children and learned an abundance of information on the topic of health. Way too much really. It was overwhelming. It was hours and hours of talks by gurus all over. I listened to nearly every single one during nap times and in the car, took notes when and where I could and subscribed to much of what I learned as a to do list. These of course became things I had to do because if it was right, that was how I had to do it, of course. It was crazy. It sent me into a tail spin that indeed lasted for years, as I consumed more information on the topics. It was only the last couple of years that I began to realize how unsustainable all of it was and began to question it. But really wrestling with it intimately took a back seat to other priorities in my life, until now.
I read a blog post on this topic over the weekend, spurred by my interest to dig deeper and wrestle… It was by author John-Paul Flintoff, who wrote a book years ago called “How to Change the World” and was also a TedX Speaker. In this post, he talked about the Good Samaritan and made a point that essentially the Good Samaritan was responding to an immediate need that was directly in front of him. He was not exposed to a constant barrage of crisis information from all over the world on every different subject. He saw the needs of someone in front of him and simply responded. One of the most compelling things he said was “Well, Guess what? Today, the people who most deserve your attention are still the people around you.” He said “Be good to yourself. Be good to those around you. And rather than worrying about what you need to do, take a moment to ask yourself what you want to do instead.” You see, not all of it is our business. We should absolutely help. We should absolutely do our part. But our part is much smaller than we make it in our heads, and because it’s smaller, it is something we can and will actually do when we are not bogged down and overwhelmed, thinking we alone have to slay all of the demons of the world and be the hero of it all. When we are not trapped in overwhelming thoughts, causing spiraling fear and shame of not being a part of the solution for every single problem; when we are free from this way of thinking, we are able to focus on the truth… able to focus on love, and gratitude, on embracing the truth and leaning in where we are presented with opportunities to love on those around us, on those that are in our lives or those that we come into contact with.
This idea for me felt liberating. I want to be a part of the solution, but when I think of all that is “wrong with the world”, when I think about how much is beyond my control, then it only makes me feel those feelings again and again and again. The fear, the shame, and the helplessness. It does NOT empower me to rise up and be the best version of myself. It does not strengthen me as a person so that I can be a voice of truth and love and peace for those in my own life, and be aware and ready when opportunity comes my way for further action.
This makes sense to me, and although it is tempting, as a recovering perfectionist, to still feel triggered toward believing the fear and shame producing thoughts that this is not enough. That there is still so much and that it’s all hopeless; I choose to actively lean into the truth. I choose to remind myself that I believe that truth always leads to love. That real unconditional love is the essence of that very authentic truth and that this truth begets peace. When I remember this, and when I practice thinking these thoughts, then my mind starts to be able to respond with that very truth when I hear the voices of fear try to pull me in.
You see, we all play a role. We are each given a purpose, and just as other parts of our lives are different, our roles in serving our world and bringing love and hope and healing are all different as well. And sometimes it will seem so small that it will feel insignificant, but I assure you that each drop of love and each glimmer of light has a dramatic affect. The ripple of the water goes much farther than we can see and the darkness is pierced by even the seemingly trivial acts of love. Love begets love. Love is endlessly powerful, and we cannot heal the world when we are trapped in and acting in response to fear. We can only heal the world with love, one loving moment at a time.
We all play our role. There are going to be people who are making contributions to the world at large in an area that you might never in your life even hear about, and likewise, there may be areas that you yourself are deeply passionate about, and pour your heart into, that seem unimportant to others around you. Guess what, that’s for a reason. We can’t all do it all, but we can each do our part. We can each lean into the grooves of our hearts, we can fan the flame within our being of good that will catch and spread like wildfire where it is meant to go. When we are not handicapped by our fear of the magnitude of all of the problems, or caught in shame of not doing it all, we can see where we can lean in and we can make a difference.
We need each other for the world to change. So often we are so caught up in what someone else is doing wrong in our eyes or not doing, we forget to see what they are doing that is beautiful. When I am doing this, it’s often because I’m already stuck in my own shame of what I am doing wrong and not doing and I’m projecting it outward, judging others instead of reflecting on what thoughts are causing this. Instead of criticizing, we need to appreciate each other. We need to stop and recognize the beauty and service that each of us performs, and in this way, each of us has an opportunity to see the way we each play a role in the healing of pain with love and gratitude.
Like that post, we can say thank you. We can stop comparing and criticizing and judging and getting offended… we can look at another person and see their unique contribution and say thank you. But as with everything else, when we are hyper-critical of ourselves we are not going to be able to be grateful for others because we are living in thoughts of shame and fear. We are reacting in our pain and drowning in the loneliness of feeling unloved and unworthy of love. When we take off the blinders of these thoughts we can see what others contribute, and we can say thank you and find insipiration.
As I have said before, nothing is personal. It’s within one’s mind that one’s own interpretations of the world are set, and it is through this lens that one sees. We all see through a lens of our own story that we are telling. The story that our brain is telling and that we are following. This is where it starts. When we believe thoughts about the world and about our role in it, those thoughts affect how we feel about all of it and then reinforce the root belief. Our brain will continue to look for evidence to support what it has already decided is truth. That can be good, if these thoughts are helpful thoughts… and likewise, that can be incredibly debilitating if these are obstructive.
We can not do it all, but we need to draw ourselves away from thinking that we are helpless and that we are failing the world. We need to stop believing the lies and acknowledge them as thoughts, thoughts that are not true that we will sometimes think, but we don’t have to anchor to. We can recognize when we are in this trap because it can cause us to do less and we feel terrible and we feel the problems magnified.
How can we help ourselves to lean toward truth, and get out of the spiral that takes us down? There are some things that I have been trying to do that have been helping me.
Before anything else, I would say become cautious of what you allow into your thought world. This comes in the way of the music you listen to, the movies and shows you watch, and the news you allow to come through. You don’t need to know it all, and knowing all of the news can be debilitating. Decide what filters will help your thought world and implement them. Whether that is limiting incoming news to one more trusted source and with filters to the type of news and when you will listen, like after lunch for 15 minutes for example. Maybe you choose to unfollow specific accounts on social media, or to avoid social media except for windows of time. Maybe you choose to become aware of when you’re struggling with your thoughts already and not expose yourself to floods of news during those times. For me it might be just before my cycle or during.
Also, I need to slow down and lean into life. I need to see what is before me and help myself to reclaim the power I have to love and spread love within my life. It’s right here and right now. All that is going on out there all of the time, that is not all my business. That is God’s business; what is my business is what God places in my life and before my feet. Where I am to love is before me, and I will lean in when I have the opportunity. And I’ll mess up and I won’t do it perfectly but I will slow down enough to actually see what is before me and try to recognize when I have the opportunity to love.
This doesn’t mean that I start to act in co-dependent ways… and a lot of us perfectionists do this. We take on all that is around us or presented to us from those in our lives as our responsibility as well. This is not helpful. Just as we can’t control or fix all of the world’s problems, we also can’t and shouldn’t try to control or fix all that is around us. We must have our own internal gauge of our needs and our responsibilities, and boundaries for our own emotional and mental health. What I mean here is that when we feel that inner hero speaking to us, not in fear or shame but in love, we answer. When God’s voice is telling us truth, we can learn to recognize this and respond with awareness.
We can remind ourselves that there is a lot of good. There are a lot of good people, acting in love and doing good things. There is a lot of good. And that good IS making a difference. Think of the people you have heard of that made bold moves and changed the world. They often changed the world by focusing on one thing. They had a passion and they leaned into it with their strengths and opportunities one step at a time. The people who change the world are not the people who do all of the things, and sometimes the business of “changing the world” happens by being love for your beautiful children, or someone else’s beautiful children. It’s sometimes being a light or the drop of water that causes a ripple effect. Hero’s come in many forms and you need to remind yourself of that. God is the hero within you looking for opportunities to love other people and work miracles with your heart, your hands and your feet. There is still pain and there are still lies, but change can happen by being a part of the truth and love and not giving up.
So also, hone in on the things you were built for. Do more of what gets you ticking. It might not be solving world hunger, but maybe it’s making people laugh. Maybe it’s making something easier to digest for those around you or simply being an ear for someone who needs it. Spreading the light isn’t always as visible to the outside world but the effect is more illuminating than we realize. We can make a difference even in the lives we have right here and now, and sometimes it will feel so small. Your mission and role in saving the world is no less important than mother Theresa’s or Ghandi. It is different, but it is beautiful and you are enough to do what is set before you to do. What is for you to do and for nobody else but you, that is your mission. You don’t need to feed all of the starving children or save all of the whales or reverse global warming; but you can love those babies in your arms with every bit of love you have; you can pursue your dream of studying marine biology, or even cleaning up your own beach and you can make changes in your life that resonate with you and feel good, and they do make a difference. You can focus on the task in front of you, on living your life purposefully with love; imperfectly but beautifully… and that my friend, is enough. You will still hear the voice of doubt trying to trigger fear and shame and trying to make you feel small and insignificant. Trying to cause you to believe that you are helpless. Those lies are there to steal your joy and your freedom, to separate you from the love that brings life and to overwhelm you and fill you with despair. Remind yourself when you find yourself in that place, frustrated and not sure how you got there, that these are lies, that you are enough and that you are not alone. Remind yourself that you’re not here for what you will do, but that when you live in truth and love, the love will organically pour out of you as it overflows and you will make a difference. Only in truth will the world be made better and will you have an opportunity to make a difference.
Lastly, joy and love and healing is spread by joy and love and healing. Don’t stop your journey. Fill up with the joy that your life has in abundance for you and watch as it spreads to those around you. Laugh, Dance, Sing, and play. Do the simple things that fill you with delight. These are the things that can help to ground you with gratitude and an awareness of the beauty and abundance that is before you. These things are freedoms that we often take for granted and they can help you with this thought work, taking off the blinders so that you can see that all the work you are given to change the world is possible with you before you and it is not too much. It is not more than you can take. It’s just enough. And you, again, you are enough.
So be grateful for this beautiful life that you have. Be grateful for those around you that are being sent on their own mission, even if it looks nothing like yours. Say thank you to yourself, to those around you, to God and DO YOU. Just do you and don’t worry about solving all of the world’s problems. Take one step at a time. Slow down, and lean into your own life; working on your thoughts and unblocking the abundant love that is trying to burst forth. Knowing you will do it imperfectly. Knowing that you’ll take two steps forward and one step back and one step forward and two steps back, and through all of it you are enough. You are imperfect and in all of it you are loved. Share with passion and respect, educate yourself and seek to understand others.
My friends, I need to hear this more than any of you… I’m messing it up constantly, but I am learning and growing and I wouldn’t change a thing. You sunshine, you are not alone. I am in the mud with you, and together we will get there. Baby steps.
I hope this message meets you where you are and you find what you need to continue forward. May your week be full of laughter and fun. May you remember that we are all imperfect and that it is wonderful to embrace ourselves even while we endure our growing pains. Until next week sunshine, have a beautiful day.
Sincerely,
Holly Ann Kasper
The Radical Imperfectionist
