Dear Insecurity

How I came out of a 48-hour bender of feeling like I'm less than.

I just spent the better part of 48 hours wallowing in my own insecurity. Unfortunately, that’s not an uncommon occurrence for me, but unlike other recent insecurity attacks, I was able to be clearheaded in my evaluation of it. In order to get my thoughts across and potentially help anyone who’s reading this, I’m going to share what I learned.

As an antecedent to this: exercise is helpful; it’s what got me out of this funk. I don’t love doing anything super strenuous and I haven’t been to the gym in a couple months, and that’s a streak that continued during this insecurity attack. But even getting out and into the fresh air and walking a couple miles this morning and making sure I got the blood flowing was frustratingly beneficial for clearing my head and helping me start to reframe things.

Anyway, onto a big lesson:

The validation has to come internally, not externally.

A longstanding theme in my years of therapy has been that I spend too much time worrying about what people think of me. It’s not that how I come across to others means nothing, but the level of investment that I’ve made there is never worth it. I’m often fretting about who likes what posts of mine or who reads what I write or how quickly people respond to a text of mine and with what level of enthusiasm, and that’s something that’ll probably never fully leave me; part of me will care about who reads this! There’ll always be that part of my brain that wonders why X person didn’t react to Y message with Z response, and that’s just setting oneself up for disappointment. But even when X person does react to Y message with Z response, all it accomplishes is anchoring myself to that external validation that I feel like I need to feel so secure internally. It should be irrelevant: I should strive to be so internally confident and secure in who I am that the speed of response or level of enthusiasm or quantity of likes simply doesn’t matter.

While “hey, just forget about the external stuff, Jon!” is great in theory, in practice it’s not something I’m ever going to be able to fully do; it’s an extremely unrealistic expectation. So instead, I keep reminding myself of this:

Nothing is as fraught as I think it is.

Whether it’s industry reputation or friendships I’ve made from working in baseball or outside of it, life just isn’t that tenuous. I’m not one iffy article away from losing my job or one text message away from blowing up a relationship. I know that I’ll make mistakes or say or do things that aren’t taken well, because I’m human. But I also know that I am respected by people I could never have dreamed would even know who I am and cherished as a friend by people all over the country, even if I’ll spend plenty of time poking holes in the idea of that.

My external tendency for humbleness and modesty need not turn into an internal lack of confidence in myself. The surreal feeling I have from having made it this far as someone who used to have extreme difficulties socially need not turn into convincing myself it’s so surreal it must be fake. It’s a weird thing to type out, but I have to keep coming back to this level of immodesty, because reinforcing it is important: I am someone who has dear friends who care about me, and I shouldn’t need constant validation from them to know that. I am someone who is damn good at his job, and I shouldn’t need anything or everything I do to go viral to be secure in that. And because of that, I’m writing this for myself and nobody else. If nobody read this far, that’s fine. If you did and you learned something from it, I’m grateful.

Thanks for reading.