Just Be Better

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I think, for the most part, there’s not much more to life than just doing it. I mean, if you are reading this, you are already in a position of immense privilege. It means you have the internet, a device to browse it on, and the freedom to browse it at your leisure. These are often underappreciated as privileges. No matter what you’ve found to hate about your life — you have a broken family, your muffin top is too muffin-y, the boy you like doesn’t like you — you’re still immensely privileged in the scheme of the cosmos.

Not that your problems aren’t real — everything is relative, and your problems are as big and as painful as anyone else’s. BUT. You have the choice to Just Be Better. That is another privilege you have, that you might not even be aware of yet.

Just make things easier on yourself. Stop worrying about eating that cream cheese bagel and just eat it. Stop telling yourself it matters that you took one day to sit in bed and watch back to back episodes of Sherlock. Take a load off. Cut yourself some slack. Sometimes it’s OK that you haven’t met all your dreams yet, that you can’t always muster the motivation and the ambition and the energy to be fighting to create the life you perceive as correct or desirable. Sometimes it’s OK to just live it, inhabiting whatever feeling it is you feel in the moment.

Just be better. Part of that is accepting yourself as you are, your mood as it exists, but also not wallowing in self-pity for inordinate amounts of time. Get out of bed in the morning and even if you’re hungover or lonely or sad tell yourself you are fabulous. Do star jumps at the end of your bed and imagine you’ve been set on fire. Work harder, longer and more diligently than you did yesterday. Put on your sneakers and run as fast as you can for as long as you can, even if it’s just one block. Tomorrow you can run two.

Things are as hard as you make them. You’re one of those bouncy balls that comes out of one of those prize machines where you put in a coin and twist the knob, and an arbitrarily chosen gift falls down into your palm, encased in a hollow, round, little plastic container. When you’re unwittingly plucked out of the pile and thrown against the wall you can bounce back, even if you never asked to be thrown in the first place — and remember the harder you go down the higher you can ricochet towards the sky. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

DON’T SWEAT IT! You’re going to be fine but only if you choose to be fine. Everything you need is already inside you, you just need to find a way to spew it out of you and into the world. Make some hard decisions. Be scared. God, be fucking terrified. No time is wasted time unless it is time spent succumbing to defeat. Hanging about in your knickers picking ingrown hairs is not a waste of time if you are content. It is if you’re using it to avoid something else. Don’t shirk the unknown; don’t shirk failure. Everyone is afraid to fail, the difference between people is that some aren’t paralysed by that fear.

I already said it, but: Just Be Better. Find a way, find your way; no one else’s method, no one else’s path, no one else’s wants or hopes or dreams are right for you. You’re might not be a special snowflake but you are a special snowflake. Your unique angles don’t make you better, or immune to being understood, but they mean that you’re not beholden to anyone else’s perception of the world or judgement of your soul. You are just you; everyone is just everyone. It’s very simple, and not very profound at all.

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image – Jochen Spalding