I keep disappointing myself

does anyone else find balance impossible?

I feel like I just can’t get anything right. I feel like I am in a perpetual state of self-improvement. I feel like no matter how hard I try, there’s always something I do that is self-destructive. No matter how much work I seem to do on myself, my toxic patterns and hedonistic behaviours always prevail. As soon as I loosen my grip everything falls apart; I am incapable of finding equilibrium if I am not constantly monitoring the scales.

I wish I knew a life that lies between extreme restriction and chaos, a life of softness and balance, but I keep breaking the promises I make to myself, to the point that I can no longer make them in the first place. I am sick of having to forgive myself, of letting myself down, of proclaiming that I have learnt the lesson and I will never do it again. Just to find myself right back saying ‘this will be the last time’.

Fighting the urge to blow everything up is something I struggle with every day. Making the active choice to not fall into a pit of despair and revel in the agentic state of shifting blame takes up all of my energy. If, even for a brief second, I think I have it all figured out and I can let the whites of my knuckles relax, the bomb goes off.

I wonder what lies between loneliness and social exhaustion. Indolence and burnout. Lethargy and sleep deprivation. Sobriety and escapism. Numbness and sadness. How does everyone seem to balance along this tightrope so gracefully, when I feel like I have been falling all my life?

Daydreaming is the closest thing I have to a living a life that isn’t one of extremes. Deep within my limerence I create a world that doesn’t spike my nervous system, or bore me senseless. I become a version of me that has mastered balance, rest, guiltlessness, discipline. In this world I fall in love, and people fall in love with me. I stick to things I care about. I achieve things I set out to do. I don’t run away. I don’t make excuses. Life feels easier in my head. But then I snap back to reality, and the jenga tower starts toppling, and the wind sweeps the house of cards, and the milk spills, and the rain starts.

It’s not that I am not resilient, I think my body is just sick of having to be. My tolerance for struggle and stress and sadness has been well and truly maxed out and I just don’t have the capacity for any more hurt or hard. I just can’t. My lack of accountability is some kind of fucked up defence mechanism because I know I am going to disappoint myself eventually.

I fall in love with the idea of things, and then get discouraged when the journey gets too difficult. I get so scared of failure that I avoid trying at all. I hide behind the pursuit of a slow life when I actually crave immobility so I can never get disappointed when nothing happens. Nothingness is the only way I achieve some kind of calm, but with this numbness comes a lack of creativity, inspiration and motivation. I barely write, in fact I barely do anything, because anything other than nothing gets too much.

I wish I had something to keep me grounded, but routine and structure suffocates me, whilst freedom makes me feel nervously untethered. The nomads land between all of these dichotomies is an unattainable paradise that I feel too broken to access. Perhaps one day I will stop disappointing myself—either through forgiveness or finally getting my shit together.