Nestled in my well-organized labyrinth of Pinterest boards is a sub-board called “help yourself”, containing cultivated text posts sharing “3 types of self-soothing thoughts” or “How to Cope with Blah days”. Some transposed tweets or tumblr posts don’t have titles, instead they jump in to explaining how you’re not responsible for the healing of others or how you should use the 24/48 rule to decide whether it’s too late to bring up an issue you have in a relationship.

This has been my fastest growing board because I’ve been enchanted by the idea of self-improvement. I want to learn as much as I can about how to be the best version of myself, for the benefit of myself and others. I want to challenge myself to think about my relationships and opportunities in new ways. Perhaps a suppressed, embarrassingly resilient part of me wants to seem like I have it all together, if I’m being honest. I want to convince everyone my life is awesome – including myself. 

My intention with the things I saved was always to learn from them, implement them in my life until boom, I’m superhuman. My patience will be endless, my empathy infinite, my relationships blooming, my mental health through the roof, and because I’ve learned all this like second nature, it won’t even be hard. 

Recently one of the text posts Pinterest suggested for me to save started with the sentence “wanting positive experiences is a negative experience; accepting negative experiences is a positive experience.”  It explained Alan Watts’ backwards law which stated that the more we pursue positive feelings, the less satisfied we become, and the lack of what we idolize only reinforces what we don’t have. I read the post, and then I read it again. The unnamed source shared a universal truth on a platform with millions of users that somehow cut so personally, it’s like they’d read my journal. 

Once I saw how the quest for self-improvement was leaving me unsatisfied, I noticed clues everywhere. In trying to be so elevated, so advanced, in the way I experienced life, I was burnt out and uninspired. “help yourself,”a command in and of itself, smirked from the corner of my digital experience. The ‘self-help,’ inspirational book I had been trying to read each night, “The Art of Possibility,” was safely buried under the fiction novel I had turned to instead, because it was just too exhausting to underline all the ways I could be better and wasn’t at the end of a long day.

I don’t mean to sound so extreme; self-improvement culture has taught me a lot about others and myself – something I, a highly internal and reflective person, rather enjoy. But too much of a good thing is still too much. I like to forget I’m only human too, and I need breaks and spaces to cry over dumb things or lose my patience. Focusing too much on what I lack makes me feel insufficient at best, and takes away from my life. 

I’ll end with a bit of irony; another post I’d saved sums this up well. ‘supermoonscarab’ on tumblr wrote, “too much self reflection is not a good thing honestly. go outside and plant a garden and then cook yourself a homemade dinner then mop the floors and change your sheets and take a hot shower then you won’t care so much”. 

I think they just might be right.