When Self-Improvement Becomes Self-Scrutiny

The challenges of learning to accept who I am

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I thought I had accomplished everything that was required to be “successful” enough. After all, I had lost the weight, exposed my inner demons for what they were, and learned to accept what I couldn’t control externally.

Or so I thought.

But even after 4 years of consistent self-evaluation, self-development, and self… everything, I still felt alien to the one person I was trying to “improve” upon. Myself.

I realized that my entire “self-improvement” mindset was built upon one fundamental lie that I had been telling myself the entire time. The lie that who I truly am was not acceptable, and that by creating a different mindset, I would fit in with what society deemed to be the standard for normalcy and desirability.

Sound familiar?

It’s likely that you’ve been in the same situation

I made the mistake of defining self-improvement as something that was necessary to achieve true happiness. I devoured countless self-help material, hoping that it would give me the magic formula for “happiness and success”, whatever that was.