When you’ve really, truly had enough
Getting fed up is incredibly motivating
Getting disgusted is insanely powerful. Maybe not in the healthiest way — but very often in an irrevocable one.
It’s important to note that this is not self-hatred. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s a sudden feeling of deep and authentic self-love; a wash of realization like waking up from sleep-walking and looking down to see a gallon of egg nog or an empty pizza box in your hands and, startled, you all but shout,
“What the hell am I doing?!”
This. Except it’s your real life.
This sudden feeling is incredibly powerful. Both for the speed at which it hits us as well as the depth of disgust associated with it.
Like most of us, I have probably always — off and on — thought about losing some weight. I have never been overweight — in fact, I’ve probably been thin by most standards — but, like many people and certainly many young women — I always figured it’d be nice to be a few pounds lighter and I’d think about this in a sort of wishy-washy way like we do, and sometimes I’d even get kinda serious about it, watching what I ate and hitting the treadmill like a good little gym mouse trying it on for size.
But I never lost anything — not a single pound.
Up until summer of 2008, when I finally, truly had enough — and lost like 20 pounds.
Looking back, I can’t really say what the main difference was — I thought I was serious about it before, too. But something just sort of clicked that summer, and I woke up one morning and had simply had enough.
And other than a few pounds here or there, I’ve never put the weight back on.
And it’s been this way with every single good decision I’ve ever made — leaving a toxic relationship, quitting a job I didn’t like, moving from a city that wasn’t mine.
You deliberate and deliberate and deliberate and you kind of always think that someday you’re really gonna do this, damnit but you also kinda never really make it happen.
Until one day you do.
You just get fed up. You decide. And just like that, it’s done. And you don’t look back.
Maybe other people make their decisions methodically; slowly; step by step.For me, step by step is only the execution and progress; the thing that happens after a decision; the work — that part when you’re forging your way through unblazed trails day after day afterwards. But for me, that initial decision is always in a flash — a sudden realization and a serious commitment with no amount of turning back.
And the thing everything else hinges on happening first.
Ayodeji Awosika writes,
“Sometimes the best way to point your life in a new direction is to become completely disgusted with your current one… I finally said ‘enough is enough.’Strong negative emotions can be just as powerful as positive ones. When will ‘enough be enough,’ for you? When will you decide you can’t live this way for even one more day? Once you make that decision, everything changes.”
Indeed. Everything does.
Disgust is new standards
And it’s self-love. It’s just tough love. And tough love is better than the disguised self-loathing thing we’re really doing when we tell ourselves one thing but aren’t being serious enough to see a change.
Disgust is usually never going back. Disgust is a “can’t unsee” situation. Disgust is something better — for you and for your life.
And if you really want to change and somehow “can’t,” you almost certainly will once you get fed up. And everything is everything from there.