The Pain of Self Improvement

After I finish a particularly painful self improvement project, such as writing a letter from an ex to myself or working with my inner critic in some other way, I take a moment to really feel the pain I've inflicted on myself. It must be a sensation similar to recovering from surgery. "Well, I'm still alive, but was it worth it?"

Obviously surgery comes with real life or death risks and can be the difference between walking and rolling around in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, so the comparison is not perfect. But both real surgery and emotional surgery hurt. You bleed on the table or you bleed on the page, and either way there is a bit of soreness after. And, after both, there is a chance that you'll have to go through the whole process again.

In short, reprogramming the brain is not an easy task. Developing new and more beneficial habits takes real effort, often so much that it is shocking than anyone strives to self improve at all. Having just written down 10 things I needed to improve and then diving into each in explicit detail, I'm shocked that human society ever emerged from Feudalism. Changing for one person is hard, and it must take a lot of people changing to change a whole society.

In the end, I hope the effort to change is worth it. Success is just the willingness to try different things until something works.