Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
Ready? I got some shit to dish out. Eat it if it tastes good. Spew it out if it makes you gag.
I have an idea for how to get your shit together.
Well I’ll just tell you how I got my shit together first cause in reality I don’t know what you got goin on. Could be some fucked up shit beyond my realm of comfort. But for me, there was one glaring problem I had, that being I was a goddamn lunatic fucked up dickwad alcoholic. So like.. not much could be done before I stopped that part: the drinking.
I remember being at this music venue and passing Joseph (the lead singer of some band I used to work with) and instead of saying hi, he slid me a bag of coke.
Wow. I have friends, I was thinking.
I went to the bathroom and didn’t even do that big of a bump, you know, I didn’t wanna be rude to my bestie. No idea if that dude is dead or alive. He’s actually mediocre famous—or was, maybe still is if he’s still alive. Maybe he’s ten years sober like me? Whatever point is there’s something you don’t wanna change, right? Anything but that, you’re thinking. I’ll fire my therapist, get a new one, I’ll shave and take showers regularly, I’ll be nicer to my wife and spend more time with the kids, but not that. No, anything but that.
That that for me was drinking.
What’s that that for you?
Anything but quitting smoking.
Anything but weed.
Anything but ice cream.
Anything but talking to my mom about that thing that happened twenty years ago.
Anything but breaking up with my boyfriend.
Whatever that anything is for you, that’s likely where to start. Whatever it is… that’s the crux of your misery. Get rid of it and everything else will improve tenfold.
So that’s how you get your shit together.
In all actuality, this is a short post, which I’ll probably make longer because Lydia, the CEO I appointed of Scrambled Gregs (isn’t that funny?), she’s an SEO freak and will probably be like…
nooooooo noooooooo it’s good but like… how long did it take you to write?
Not very long.
I can tell.
Then I’ll feel bad and add more words to make it look like I put forth more effort. So before that happens, maybe there’s something else I can say…
Ah, got it.
The main point of this post is to get your shit together and fix your life, the answer is incredibly fuckin simple. Your map has been drawn. The compass is pointing exactly where you needa go, but to take the action is about the hardest pivot you’ll ever make. And you know this, and once you address that one thing that’ll change it all, you’re now finally on a blank slate. Now it’s time to reform your opinion of yourself.
Think about how you talk about yourself to yourself.
Even after I got sober and everything in my entire life began to get better, there was still shit that wasn’t perfect. Sooo… how to get your shit together requires more effort than knocking down that big domino, even though you could probably do ONLY that and your life would improve by mountains of fluffy snow, whatever that means. But in order to get myself right as fuck, right to a point where I can genuinely be humble (the true test of getting your shit together—not needing to talk about it), I had to address my second biggest domino:
Low self-esteem.
I noticed I gave adjectives to everything I did, which reinforced a not-so-positive view of myself. Everything I did was weird, or odd, or crazy.
How do I do so much shit? Someone might ask…
Oh, I’m weird like that. I just can’t stop writing. It’s an addiction, maybe not so healthy. I need to always be accomplishing shit, it’s bizarre.
See that? I call myself weird, not so healthy, and bizarre in one sentence, and these types of sentences come outa my mouth all the time. So, I swapped out how I would phrase certain shit, and it had a massive impact on–not only my current status of life, but also how I thought of my current status of life, which is equally important.
How do I write so much shit? Well I just love exploring my mind. I’m so curious. The best way I’ve found to dig into what interests me is to write about it. So, that’s why I write so much.
See the difference? So much better.
But how did I arrive at a place where I determined that I had low self-esteem?
This is a good question. I mean, to any onlooker I am deeply rooted in self-awareness and totally tranquil. I talk to everyone and project confidence everywhere. But I took notice of a few things that definitely interfered with my like and then I reverse engineered a bit.
For instance, when I have to go to a social gathering, I piss cement blocks from my blatter. I obsess about it and replay how horrible it’ll be for weeks on end, as soon as I find out I have an obligation.
Why is that?
I also noticed I had visceral reactions to being touched, even by my fiance, social gatherings, like I said–fuck that, I’m always scared of what others will think of me, that nobody will like me, that maybe I’m still that unlikeable piece of childhood shit I was in seventh grade. Why am I still jerkin off to skanky whores on Instagram? Probably cause I feel like I deserve total gutter trash because I think of myself as gutter trash. Point is deep down something was off, or at the very least it could be way better.
My therapist pointed out the way I talk about myself to myself is sometimes more representative of a teenager than an adult, and you know damn well how I felt about myself as a teenager: not good. I knew this, and you know this, right? So yeah, I wanted something better. But in order to fix my life, I have to be continuously searching for what I’m not satisfied with then going after it like a lion on steroids.
So, that’s why I reached out to the therapist I was just tellin you about…
How’d you find me?
Well, I Googled “male therapist in beacon” and five people came up and you were one of them.
Works for me, he says.
Who the fuck are you?
So we started talking and doing sessions and all that shit and I told him I wanted to become more emotionally available to myself and to my wife. I told him I didn’t understand why I hated to be loved and that I wanted to feel okay being touched and being vulnerable. So, after like two months of sessions so far, of me telling him about getting kicked out of my parents’ house at fourteen…
Oh right.
That’s one thing I changed right away.
I used to say “I left my parents’ house at fourteen.”
You left? My therapist asked me one day.
Yeah.
No, children don’t leave their parents’ house at fourteen, you were kicked out of your parents’ house. You were abandoned.
Oh.
Yeah.
Right, that makes better sense, feels better to say it too.
Anyway, how I talk to myself about myself, (like saying it’s weird I whack off to obscure porn when actually it’s not weird at all. It’s awesome) is something I came to learn I had to work on. And after telling him–my therapist–about my childhood with Tourette’s and being ashamed of it and scared to make friends cause people might find out then getting popular and swimming in a sea of hot Long Island chicks but still wanting to take revenge on all the bullies who fucked with me before that and robbing houses to vent my frustration and joining a pseudo gang in ninth grade before I got strung out on ecstasy and shrooms then being kicked outs my parents’ house and sent to a rehab in Minnesota, another in Louisiana for six months where I fought daily cause I was called a Jew fuck and kike this and Juden that, and running away from there and ending up at juvie for two years in Georgia and some wilderness in Utah and then running away to be homeless and hitchhiking my way through adolescence, after all that, we arrived at a few key areas that likely I have been carrying baggage from.
I discovered how I thought of myself was incorrect, and that was the second thing that had to change: how I described myself to myself.
Change the one big thing to get to a clean slate, then pivot your thinking.
All this is to say that there’s that one thing you would rather jump off a Cliff than change, and that’s where you should start (good North Star that’ll tell you what needs to happen first)…
As I said, for me it was my drug addiction and alcoholism…
And then once you’re normal (more normal), you can tackle the way you view yourself. I did it with therapy, but you can do it however you want. Likely therapy cause it’s hard to be objective about yourself and give yourself advice about… well, yourself. At some point, someone else needs to take a deep look at who you’ve become and make suggestions.
This is almost so simple it’s not worth posting about…
So simple yet incredibly difficult.
The moral of this story is, how you get your shit together is to change that ONE thing you know damn well is the fuckin thing holding you back. How? Well good question, but try imaging how you would feel in ten years if you DIDN’T change that one thing, and what your life might look like if you kept going. Usually, it takes you somewhere old and miserable, and you don’t want that. So just fuckin do it, as Pepsi would say. Just kidding, I know New Balance said that shit.
Okay I gotta go do some work. But here’s a good way to quit smoking weed.