Embracing the Chaotic Unknown

Self-sabotage, the Fear of Success, and a few ideas on how to deal with them.

“It felt incredible to be back together with everyone, finally; it had felt like ages. The boundless love, laughter, and kinship that I'd so deeply craved were finally there again, lasting only a few moments before I woke up and remembered everything.”

Chaos is comforting. Sometimes it veneers as an orchestrated frenzy. When trying to conduct an orchestrated frenzy next to the demands of the modern world, everything is bound to detonate in the end.

Controlled chaos is by definition a volatile illusion. The antidote to chaos is, unfortunately, incredibly boring. Everything becomes orderly and scheduled. This isn’t inherently a bad thing. By no means. In fact, the personal rebellion against it is indicative of a bizarre problem. What is this paradoxical state of being where chaos is comfort and order is agony?

I remember pumping gas one night. At the time, I had a great, steady job. I was sober. Active social and dating life. On paper, I was doing incredible. Killing it. In reality, I was the kid pumping gas while heavily daydreaming about throwing it all away.

‘Wouldn’t it be funny to just give it all up?’. A metaphorical l’appel du vide, if you will. L’appel du vide, the call of the void, implies an attraction to nothingness. That isn’t quite what I would experience. It was more like a metaphysical force pulling on every aspect of my being, encouraging me to return to chaos, to return home.

There are times I felt prisoner to the destiny of recreating the childhood conditions I so famously despised. It’s very obvious in my writings that my childhood was very chaotic and what has followed from that is a lifetime search for tranquility and ‘happiness’, whatever that means. I always saw this as me moving towards something better. I’ve justified certain uneasy feelings on the journey as a consequence of a natural ‘two steps forward, one step back’ sort of progress. That is what it is, too, to an extent.

What I’ve been more and more aware of recently, however, is that it isn’t just this ebb and flow growth pattern. It’s that I’ve misunderstood what a comfort zone really is. The phrase evokes an image of a child in a room with their favorite blankey. That’s the comfort zone. The child never wants to leave their room but a letter from Santa is waiting for them in the mailbox. The child sprints outside, grabs the letter, sprints back in. Success. They left their comfort zone to retrieve the letter.

That isn’t the reality of a comfort zone for me. My comfort is chaos. People yelling. Drama being tossed around. Heart rate at 120 just by sitting there. Peace, on the other hand, is so boring. Our brains naturally want to take the path of least resistance. Whatever path it’s most used to taking. Embracing peace, for me, means facing Resistance. For me to experience peace, I have to come clean. I have to admit this to myself: I am addicted to chaos.

The manifestation of this addiction comes in many forms. It could be:

• Procrastination. Sometimes even purposely to ‘light a fire under my ass’

• Drinking heavily the night before a big presentation at work

• Condescending self-talk

• Shying away from any challenges or opportunities that would better my situation

Anything that would get me away from chaos is ultimately destroyed. Self-sabotaging at its finest.

“Procrastination is the fear of success. People procrastinate because they are afraid of the success they know will result if they move ahead now. Because success is heavy, carries a responsibility with it, it is much easier to procrastinate and live on the ‘someday I’ll’ philosophy” - Dennis Waitley

Yesterday, I was watching some of the neighborhood kids playing with my dog, Bear, while I was chatting with their mom. They were all beyond thrilled and it was just a group of babies laughing and goofing around. I suddenly felt such a profound sorrow as my brain told me ‘You’ll never have this’.

Recently, anytime I start dating someone, I seem to rush to the part where I just abruptly end it with them. Is it because I really know what I want in a partner, so I can spot what I don’t want immediately? Maybe. It’s more likely a fear of getting what I want. I want a family of my own. I want to raise children in a healthy, loving environment. An environment opposite to what I had. So why do I throw away relationships that could potentially get me there? Well, I’ve decided that I’m afraid of success.

There clearly exists a part of me that fundamentally rejects the idea of succeeding in my deepest desires. I’ve been able to push this aspect away in the past in order to reach an admirable amount of real world ‘successes’, but it always seems to come back with a vengeance.

I’ve reached a point where I simply cannot allow a fear of success, which leads to self-sabotaging, to have power over me any longer. I’ve read voraciously to see how I could tackle this head on, and this is what I found.

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1. Identify the Root of the Fear

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“If you self-sabotage a healthy relationship when you finally receive one, it may be because peace was never granted to you without a catch. Peace looks threatening when all you ‘ve ever known was chaos” - MindfullMusings

Remote and Hybrid work schedules have been a blessing. It was always very challenging to contort myself into the 9-5 commute schedule for five days a week. Wake up, get ready, go to work, get back home, cook dinner, do your chores. Okay, awesome, glad I have so much free time left to do what I wanted (hah). I noticed that this schedule quickly had me developing sleep ‘issues’. It would come time to go to bed so I could get my 7-9 hours of sleep and I just would not go to sleep. This became a repeating pattern and I looked into everything related to insomnia, but nothing was working for me.

I had to take a really deep, comprehensive view at what the ‘issue’ was and when I finally figured it out, it all seemed so obvious. I wasn’t struggling with insomnia; I was straight up rebelling. I didn’t have time to do everything my heart genuinely desired in the bullshit weekly corporate schedule so, I sacrificed sleep hours to be able to do more. The freedom of the night was intoxicating. Everyone was asleep so I could just do whatever it was I wanted to do without interruption. It was nice! Unsustainable self-sabotage, but nice!

I later came to find that this is something psychologists call ‘revenge sleep time procrastination’. What an incredible label. It captures the essence of it so perfectly. In the end, I shifted my schedule so I was waking up early instead of sacrificing sleep. That way, I could at least still enjoy the feeling free while everyone else slept. Perhaps it’s all about finding the best possible compromise.

Being able to identify the specific reason why I was doing something helped tremendously when I ultimately began to work towards adopting a better option.

2. Befriend Resilience and Self-Compassion

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Once we identify a fear, it’s necessary to be patient with ourselves as we build the necessary toolset needed to tackle the problem.

Let’s break down another fear and see how we can move past it: Fear of success with finding a partner and having a child with her. As I mentioned, I want children for a few reasons, but a big one being that I’d like to give them the calm, peaceful home that I never had.

What if through all the healing, all the training, all the self-edification, etc., I ultimately end up not being able to give that to them? What if the stresses of certain moments activate not only the chaos loving side, but a side I don’t know about that will replicate exactly how my parents treated me? I’d have just brought a child into the world only for me to repeat the sins of my parents. The child would have every right to resent me. I helped grant them their existence; therefore, I also granted them their ability to suffer.

Those thoughts are what they are, but the benefit of having them is that I have an idea of what areas I need to train myself in. If I’m particularly concerned with high stress situations triggering some deep, abusive side of me, then it stands to reason that my best defense against that would be training myself to befriend my stress response. Whether it’s through breathing practices, meditation, yoga, whatever. The fear usually contains the antidote.

For my situation above, where I had mentioned how boring order and calm can feel, I would have to learn how to feel content in those states of being. I would have to learn to identify triggers that lead me to feel like I want to throw it all away and learn how to mitigate them.

The consequences of succeeding seem far less daunting when we lean into what our fears are trying to tell us. It requires an immense amount of self-compassion to be patient with ourselves, understand that we’re not bad people for having these thoughts and fears, and that we deserve to succeed in these areas. There’s no need to throw a wrench into it all out of fear that we’ll actually get what we want.

3. Be Honest with Yourself

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How much of it is actually a fear of success vs. fear of a success that you do not even want to achieve, but only feel like you have to?

At the beginning of this letter, I included a 'two sentence story’ I had written. I don’t really write fiction that often, so it was a bit out of character for me. The reality of it, in a section whose title demands absolute candor, is that that’s how I wake up at least three times a week. It’s either ex-girlfriends, big friendship groups that I’m no longer a part of, or both. It’s bizarre. I don’t want any of the people in these dreams. Not a single one appeals to me anymore. I don’t even need these big friend groups anymore. Perhaps these dreams are signaling to me that I’m lonely, but before I really looked myself in the eye, I thought I DID want those people back.

It would have been such a wasted effort if I pursued it. I also think our minds and bodies have a way of self-sabotaging us when we’re moving towards something that isn’t truly meant for us, or even good for us.

Write out a list of the things you want to achieve. For each bullet, close your eyes and just visualize what it would feel like to achieve that goal. Everything from how you’d be dressed, how big your smile would be, how fresh to death your cologne smells, whatever. Now, stay with this image and really notice how it makes you feel. Are the images invoking anxiety? Is there a sense of doubt in your gut or tightness in your chest? Lean into these feelings and see what they have to say. It could be that this isn’t something you genuinely want after all.

4. Discover how you Self-Sabotage

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I am very good at convincing myself that something is a good idea or even the right idea, when I know damn well it is not. Luckily, I’ve learned exactly what I say, feel, and exactly how I react to this covert devious devilry to trick myself. Once I learned that pattern, it became way easier to recognize it, roll my eyes, and move on.

“I have a tendency to sabotage relationships; I have a tendency to sabotage everything. Fear of success, fear of failure, fear of being afraid. Useless, good for nothing thoughts” - Michael Bublé

I’m reminded of people I’ve met in the fitness community. They claim they want to lose weight and have this ideal body, but they also say and do some of the most ridiculously funny things. ‘Oh, I just burned 200 calories on the treadmill! I deserve this chocolate cupcake as a reward’. Okay. Sure. Enjoy yourself. This particular person self-sabotages by choosing to reward their hard work with a treat that is completely counterproductive to the work they just put in.

Another example would be my aforementioned dating one. I would be seeing somebody and then just choose to end it way too quickly. I never really gave it the chance to blossom and see what it could have become. I’m self-sabotaging by jumping the gun and the antidote would be to just chill out and let things unfurl and see what’s what.

Ignorance begets strife. Understanding begets fellowship - Gulool Ja Ja

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What are some of the areas where you notice yourself self-sabotaging the most? What are your self-sabotage methods of choice? Let’s get them out in the open, people!

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