Self Sabotage

This is a topic I wanted to discuss for some time now, but never attempted to write about.  Maybe it's difficult to discuss why people sabotage their own lives, or maybe it's because it's hard to admit that we all sabotage our lives. 

So how do people self sabotage?  There are different situations to consider when asking how.  There are personal relationships, office relationships, friendships, careers, and family.  Each one has many different ways to push the self destruct button and watch the countdown till the end.  But let's start with the easiest one to talk about; family.

Family is one of the easiest categories to sabotage; mostly because we know they tend to forgive more often than turn and walk away.  We find ways to pick apart relationships with our siblings due to jealousy, anger over something petty, or even blaming them for something they did or failed to do for you.  Parents are a whole other subject.  Most of the time kids blame their parents for everything.  It starts when they're teenagers that don't get their way.  Freud always attributed a child's psychological issues to be based solely on the parents' failure.  As adults we tend to gravitate to the continuation of blaming them for our issues or realizing they had our best interest at heart and did the best they could.  (The continued debate for this topic can be discussed at a later time).

In terms of careers, there are a few ways to self destruct.  For starters, you could keep all the anger and resentment you have towards your company or boss inside until you snap.  When it unleashes, it's like verbal diarrhea; spewing uncontrollably until either you have nothing left to say or you're fired and security escorts you from the building.  Another way is by being afraid to take chances because you become too complacent in your current job title and performance.  This is one of the most common ones.  People get too comfortable and don't want to to step up to the next level at work because they feel it will require more work, responsibility or could equate to a higher possibility of scrutiny. 

Office relationships and office friendships are typically a time bomb waiting to go off at any moment and are usually self explanatory.  Being friends inside and out of the business is fine as long as you remember to stay within the boundaries during work hours and not let it influence your performance or behavior during that time. 

Finally the biggest ways to self sabotage are personal relationships and personal life.  There are way too many to go into, but I will go over a few examples.  The first being the personal life.  The biggest issue people face is procrastination which goes hand in hand with laziness.  Both start when we're younger.  In today's world, most kids are too used to playing their Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation when they have free time.  It's one of the things they look forward to doing after school.  They can play what they want, interact with friends or strangers online and never leave the comfort of their bedroom/house.  But by relying on these devices, kids take their focus off of doing work and caring more about play time.  It becomes the same when they get older.  As a child, the procrastination takes the form of waiting till the last minute to do homework, reports, or studying.  As an adult, it takes the form of forgetting to pay bills, accruing high amounts of debt, going late to work, or simply letting simple tasks snowball into something bigger.   I have found myself in many of these situations in life and have learned the hard way many times you can't fall into the pit of procrastination.


Finally the personal relationships have a few forms.  The first is picking fights based on insecurities, or not getting over past situations from an ex.  Everyone goes through theses.  Everyone has baggage that they need to deal with and most of the time can't until they work through it in either a rebound, the next relationship, therapy, or other creative ways.  The next level deals with insecurities on higher levels.  The people in the relationship tend to think the other person is too good for them or think one of them is not good enough for the other.  If you put someone too high on a pedestal it makes them feel they have so much to live up to and if they can't be that, then they fail.  On the opposite hand if you view them or yourself on a lower level, the person might feel like they're not good enough and tend to walk away.  The final level has more to do with the what if situation and cold feet scenarios.  The what if situation falls on people who have been in a relationship for a while and wonder what their life would be if they were single.  It typically happens when they are either unhappy in the relationship or has many friends that are single.  They tend to go out with the single group and hang around them wishing they could live that life once again.  The cold feet scenario are found in the people who are about to get married.  They're faced with the realization they're about to settle down with one person for the rest of their life and try to come up with any reason not to. 

Now if you made it to this point, you're probably asking yourself what the hell is the point of all this or why the hell did you keep reading?  My hope is that you did read everything.  Did you see yourself in any of those situations?  I bet you did.  Maybe you found yourself listed a couple of times.  The point I wanted to create was that everyone self sabotages their life.  We all push the self destruct button at one point or another.  But there's always the abort button.  We can pull that steering wheel back, avoid the collision, and put ourselves back on course before it's too late.  My hope is that by reading this, you can notice when you're being self destructive or sabotaging and correct yourself.

Relationships

This is a little off the topic tonight but still works with being a writer.  Relationships are both a blessing and a curse.  Now before you agree, disagree or want to throw something at me, let me explain this statement.  When I was younger, (first started writing) I had a lot of relationship issues with my ex.  There were many things I needed to work on and there were about the same or more that she had to work on.  Never the less, we lived together for many years and had to deal with each other every day.  I told her a lot about the ideas I had and the dream of me becoming a writer.  There were times were she said she believed in me and a couple of times (when arguing) where she threw it in my face and told me I was dellusional.  I know it was in the heat of the moment, but there was always a part of me that thought she really didn't have faith in me that I could become a writer. 

Fast Forward to the present.  It's been nearly 5 years since my ex and I split up and now I am with an incredible woman.  She supports me and encourages me and I do the same for her.  When it comes to my writing, she continuously tells me to write even when I feel down and don't want to.  When I think of her, I have a stronger desire to accomplish more (she inspires me to work harder).

Just from that alone is a considerable difference between my old life and my current one.  But that's not why I chose this topic tonight.  I chose this because I have seen a lot of friends in bad relationships and ones that unexpectedly broke their hearts.  A lot of them have chosen to dwell on what happened and what could have been, others decided to pack up their stuff and move away and start over.  It's not me to tell you how to handle the situation.  The only thing I will say, is don't hold a grudge over what happened.  It means the relationship wasn't meant to be.  There is someone out there and the harder you look for them, the harder it is to see them.  And social media isn't the best place to vent your story to the world but if you want to talk about it, find a couple of close friends to lean on or write down your feelings about the situation.  You never know what a couple of pages of writing while you're in that emotional state can bring you. 

So as I said relationships can be a blessing and a curse.  It all depends on how you perceive it. 

Don't forget to listen to the Anthony Charles Podcast this week for my interview.
http://soundcloud.com/anthonycharlesofficial/episode-20-andrew-hess-author

And follow me on Twitter and FB
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2 Years of near silence

I felt like I lost everything.  The one in a million idea I thought would give me everything I ever wanted in life, was gone.  Months of work went down the drain when we had to factory reset.  I was devastated and didn't think I would ever be able to come up with another idea like that again.  It took me two years before I was able to come up with anything else to write about.  One idea stuck out in my mind, but could never do anything with it. 

By 2008, my life took a drastic turn for the best (although I took it as the worst at the time).  My relationship ended with my ex and I moved back home to Long Island.  I had to start over from scratch with my life.  I moved back in with my parents, my job botched my transfer and I was without a job. 

There was one brightside to the situation.  There was a desktop computer at my parents house that had an A Drive.  I was able to work on the Phoenix Blade again.  I pulled up the file for the first time in two years.  There was only two feelings that ran through me.  Happiness to see my work again, and anger at how my writing once was.  Somehow I managed to improve my writing ability during those two years and one failed attempt at writing a different story.  But now I felt rejuventated.  I had my original writing idea back in my hands; ready to be remodeled to my current writing style.  I felt alive again.  I felt like a Phoenix.