Personal Growth is Disgusting
Beautiful, but disgusting.
A caterpillar emerges from its chrysalis as a butterfly. It is the beauty of nature in action. Growth entails letting go of what was ‘before’ and embracing the new. But here’s what no one wants to talk about with personal growth. It can be disgusting.
Many of us are familiar with the notion that personal growth is uncomfortable. Change is rarely easy. Butterflies don’t have the smoothest (albeit slimiest) time emerging from and shedding their former home, wings all crammed together, trudging through such a delicate process.
We talk about how personal growth is often worth the uphill, — to stick with the butterfly metaphor here, gooey — journey, but we rarely hold a magnifying glass to the gruesome parts; the elements of personal growth that don’t look like a Nike ad, dripping with perfectly placed, glistening sweat beads as we run just one more mile around a beautifully landscaped park when six months ago we could barely get off the couch. And somehow during all of those picturesque runs our shoes stay impeccably clean and our feet have no blisters.
Real personal growth isn’t glamorous. Hard work is not a montage of someone burning the midnight oil at the office to reach the final deadline and wow her superiors with her presentation at the end of the month — finally landing the promotion she’s been after. The #hustle is rarely Ann Hathaway juggling Starbucks cups as her outfits steadily become more glamorous and the onion bagel consumption comes to a halt (the true travesty of that movie).
The discomfort and disgustingness of personal growth can cause people to throw in the sweaty towel altogether. This doesn’t look like how I imagined it would. I don’t feel better on this journey, in fact, I feel worse. I should just go back to what I was doing before. Clearly it was better than this.
It is normal to feel worse, not better, during times of personal growth. It is uncomfortable to leave the familiar behind, even if the familiar was causing you pain as well, in a less immediate but more pervasive way.
Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable is an important first step of growth that should not be ignored if you want to create lasting change.
We are subject to hundreds if not thousands of messages and images every single day. Some of these ideas are bound to get stuck in our subconscious even when rationally we know they are BS. Recognize you are not immune to the impact of the media and that is 100% okay.
We live in a world where the down and dirty gets promoted to us as a glamorous endeavor, but that is a dangerous and false narrative. Your personal growth will be unique to you, every single brutal minute of it.
Whatever you’re trying to achieve, whether it be a promotion, a career shift, an academic pursuit, dealing with a mental health struggle or a physical setback, it will not look like the picture you’ve built it up to be in your head.
We’re all guilty of creating stories about ourselves. Human beings are neurologically wired to love a compelling narrative.
The problem comes in when the stories we’ve written in our heads about who we are and what we are capable of don’t match reality. We give up because we think we must be doing it all wrong, or we aren’t good enough.
Advertisements and social media make these stories in our heads even more unrealistic, putting us in an even tougher position and more likely to give up.
If you set yourself up for an unrealistic image of what your personal growth journey is going to look like, you are setting yourself up for failure. Self-growth is painful, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be incredible and life-changing in its own way. There’s a lot of beauty in reality, it’s just not visible until you get there and experience it for yourself.
Check in with your end goals — Why do you want to pursue what you are pursuing? What really motivates you? Are you trying to impress others by building a better Instagram feed? Or is there something within you that feels the need for change? Be honest. There are no wrong answers here. You are not a bad person for having ‘other’ motivated goals, but it is worth checking in and digging deeper to get to your why.
When you figure out what is motivating you to change, ask yourself the tough questions about why that’s what you are after. Getting to the heart of how you feel and why you want to make a change will keep you motivated when the process isn’t as you pictured it would be.
If figuring out your genuine motivation seems like an impossible task, it might be worth finding a therapist or coach to help you understand what really needs to change to be happier and healthier.
If, more realistically, when you have a day where you feel discouraged, covered in goo, so far from where you thought you’d be, remember that this uncomfortable spot is a natural part of personal growth. Feeling this way means you are really doing it, not daydreaming about what might be!
We don’t suddenly start succeeding because we’ve changed our ways (which the story in our head desperately wants us to believe). It takes time for those changes to come to fruition.
Exercise gets harder before it gets easier. That promotion is going to require extra effort (even after you land it) before it’s the new norm. Depression doesn’t disappear the moment you seek help. A butterfly can’t fly the moment it starts emerging from its chrysalis.
Embrace the disgusting. Be patient. And don’t let the narrative you created in your head about what things would look like to keep you from enjoying the real journey right in front of you.
