If You’re Trying To Totally Transform Your Life, Read This
We do not make a change until it becomes a psychological necessity. Until we are grasped by the neck by the suffocating force of the intolerable, until we are deafened by the cacophony of our circumstance, change remains impossible.
Grasp as we may, change escapes us like an elusive eel, slipping out of our hands despite our desperation. Until change becomes the only viable option, we will retreat to realms of comfort and predictability; we will remain victims of diffuse desire versus champions of change.
Until something in your life situation repels you so fully that you are left in a bare-knuckled fist fight against yourself, you will not change. Until you find your circumstance so revolting that you would rather blind yourself than see another iteration of your indignity, you will not change.
Change happens when choice disappears. When you are faced with the sobering realization that, put simply, this shit cannot go on like this anymore, you will immediately see a fork in the road and be compelled to go one of two ways. This will be your last choice before choice disappears altogether. You will have to choose either (1) I succumb to my circumstance and let the consequences of my parasitic choices proliferate, or (2) I take a new, uncertain path that will lead me away from my old self and towards something completely new.
If your situation is psychologically intolerable, you will make the second choice. From that point on, no other option remains. You will gain the support of all of your split-selves within your psyche, all of the aspects of you that have been so disparate and divergent. Your energy will align and channel ONE path, ONE choice, and lead to ONE outcome.
Until the moment arrives when you find no salvation in any solution but total transformation, change is simply not possible. It will not happen and you should stop trying. Because the parts of you that are not interested in change will hold you back. They will sabotage you, silence the parts of you that are screaming for forward action.
We are psychologically complex as human beings. We have competing needs and desires and illusions and fantasies, all vying for the effort and attention of one mammalian brain. Our brain will push us towards the habitual, where the inertia of our past impels us to go.
The psyche will survive at all costs. The psyche will go so far as to keep you in addiction and misery just to keep itself intact. It is only when it realizes that the price it is paying for its stagnation — for its refusal to change — far exceeds the cost of change, that is precisely when transformation will occur, and not a moment sooner.
Change requires an electroconvulsive shock to break apart our neural pathways. This electroconvulsive shock comes in the form of emotion — of a sudden, intoxicating, and electrocuting realization that, if our psyche is to survive, it must change.
Marshall the emotion to electrocute your psyche. Allow yourself to feel the psychological intolerability of your circumstance. Then change becomes not only possible, but inevitable.
