You are more the moment you stop trying to become more
How we meet ourselves once we stop measuring ourselves
When will I be happy?
Why can’t I just let myself be happy?
Why do I have to ruin everything by picking it apart until any semblance of happiness is destroyed?
These are just a few of the frustrating thoughts that cloud my mind every single time something good is happening in my life.
I can appreciate the little things just fine, in fact, I know few people who find such pure happiness from the simple things like blooming flowers, the new arrangement of clouds, and basic birdsong.
But where it involves me, I become critical. I have been this way for as long as I can remember. Every win, every accomplishment, every high and success was tainted by my own inner voice fixating on the fractions of imperfection that could have been better.
I interrupt my own happiness so automatically that I spent a year disarming myself before my own wedding day. I have never experienced time so untethered from criticism — all I recall is how undeniably visible I felt and how willingly I embraced love.
Life is not meant to be lived constantly on guard. Most of life happens inside the everyday. All of life happens inside the brain. And my brain has always been critical of my existence inside my own life, which is, apart from frustrating and depressing, completely exhausting.
I cannot tell you how many times I have thought, I cannot keep doing this, and then I keep doing it anyway.
It is remarkable how quickly the exhaustion within me began to spill beyond me.
A hostile inner world will eventually create an equally hostile reflection of itself in the outer one. As much as my critical narrator pushed me to higher and higher levels of excellence, it seeped into my vocabulary with others, too. As drained as I was becoming with my own high standards, I started to notice this feeling was not just internal.
I am great at getting into relationships. I see people fully and deeply in ways that most people have never experienced before. That pulls them in. But the same skill that attracts a connection is the one that severs it because that level of visibility is more than most people want.
Over time, the same pattern always emerges no matter the person or the context. A tension would arise and thicken until the ease of communicating was so taut that it snapped entirely.
It happened enough for me to realize: I am abrasive. People find me hard. I couldn’t keep blaming others because the common denominator was me.
The inner critic I’d aimed at myself didn’t know how to stay aimed only at me.
I framed criticism as an advantage. I thought without it I’d lose what made me me: ambitious, persevering, determined, courageous, and successful.
I never considered that I created the critic as a response to fear — fear of who I might be if I wasn’t in the constant pursuit of more.
I was afraid to meet that version because I had never really let myself be her.
There have been plenty of opportunities, but the most striking one came from winning my IFBB pro card. I was shocked. It took me over a month to understand what had happened. But no one else was surprised — many people had even expected it. What did they see in me that I didn’t? So I started to take a look and what I found was nothing like what I had feared.
I thought healing would soften me and make me lose my edge. It hasn’t.
I still use survival energy as a catalyst to get things done in furious bursts and angry sprints. But now that energy has direction. I approach life with strategy. I move toward a long-term vision. I act from a place of self-trust that I am building something true to me — not grabbing what’s in front of me because it’s there.
What I know now is that just because I can, doesn’t mean that I should.
At first, it felt like I was not doing enough and I panicked. I misunderstood that doing less did not mean I was less. Slowly, I came to realize that I was simply now doing less of what was not meant for me. Every time I strip off a layer that came from my reactionary self, more of who I actually am comes into focus.
I spent so long fighting for validation large and loud enough to prove my own worth to myself. Every day was a battle to overcome and become more and better than I was because I genuinely believed I wasn’t good enough yet, but with more, I might be.
Still every time I closed the gap between where I was and where I expected I should be, the inner critic didn’t quiet down. It attached to the next horizon and measured the new gap.
With each expansion, I would quietly confirm a small pleasure in creating a whole new level of opportunity to fulfill because I was convinced that my purpose was to fulfill my potential. I built a system where as long as I kept pushing what was possible, my life had meaning.
I tricked myself into believing that my entire worth existed within that singular purpose and I designed it as an unattainable goal — a target that moved as I approached it. Tension became the measure of progress. The closer I got to the goal, the further out I expanded it. My capacity grew and my expectations increased with it. Wrapped up inside of it all was an illusion of self-esteem that hinged on the unwavering pursuit of more. I could see it, but I could never feel it because I always placed it a few steps ahead.
I learned to do this in childhood, where it felt necessary to be loud as a mechanism for getting my needs met, and I haven’t turned the volume down since. In fact, I’ve only turned it up — but the louder I get, the less the world is able to meet those needs.
I see this and still I fear that if I am not constantly loud and visible, I will be forgotten and overlooked. Maybe many will miss me.
But it would be a shame to miss myself.
I have gotten a lot of attention, both good and bad. I have received a lot of praise and criticism alike. Neither changed how I felt about myself. Being seen and heard is not the same thing as being understood, respected, valued, or loved.
I concluded from very young that fighting for more was what got you more, and the world confirmed that. The more I found to push my potential and the harder I fought to close the gap toward achieving it, the more I got. But the kind of more that the world gives is not the kind that the self is actually seeking. I wanted to feel like I had value and worth, but the world cannot provide that. There is no amount of money, possessions, status, fame, even adoration and love that can convince us of something that we do not intrinsically believe for ourselves.
The world tries to convince us of many things, and still more things we seek from the world in an attempt to convince ourselves. But worth is not something you have. It’s something you are.
My accomplishments and success did not give me worth. They revealed a semblance of it — a peek of what was already there, that I could only see once I learned how. I saw more of it the more I showed up for myself. The more consistently I showed up, the more I respected myself for doing so, and the more convinced I became that I was someone worth showing up for.
Learning self-respect taught me self-worth.
I’ve been a competitive athlete my whole life, but it wasn’t until I started lifting weights that I understood that self-respect is a skill.
I started working out because I needed to quiet the noise in my head and get back into my body. Right before I started in the gym, I endured a traumatic event that scarred me deeply both psychologically and emotionally, but it completely dissociated me from my body.
I knew if I didn’t take measures to process and heal, my inner critic would destroy me with blame and shame, so I did the only thing I could think of: become so physically strong that I would never feel so helpless again.
I didn’t expect to fall in love with bodybuilding, but I did. Everything required to be a better bodybuilder increasingly made me a better person.
I wanted to feel confident and capable, but I was timid and insecure. Still, I kept showing up.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d stumbled into something somatic — a way of learning that bypasses the thinking mind entirely by showing tangible proof. My body was learning what my brain couldn’t be talked into.
I wasn’t just rehearsing a fictional story that I was strong and sovereign, I was living it in my daily reality. Every rep was giving my brain evidence that this was true. I didn’t learn self-respect by reciting affirmations, challenging limiting beliefs, or trying to think more positively. I claimed my worth by repeating a lived, embodied experience of what was now irrefutably mine.
I saw myself as someone worth caring for.
Breaking the habit of who you have always been is not easy, but it is simple. It feels hard because we treat it as a cognitive problem. We assume that if we can think differently, we will become different. But awareness is not transformation.
We do not change by declaring a new truth. We change by practicing one.
What is repeated becomes familiar. What is familiar becomes automatic. Change begins when your actions teach the body a new way of being.
The body has to feel it before the mind can believe it. Only then does the mind begin to accept what the body already knows.
I tried telling myself I was enough. Intellectually, I understood that I had intrinsic worth without needing to prove anything, but I didn’t believe it.
The words landed in my ears but never penetrated deep enough to feel true.
I learned this happens because the brain has a filter — the Reticular Activating System, or RAS — that prioritizes what repetition has taught it to see.
I had trained mine to look for evidence of my lack. The affirmations were inadmissible.
This is why insight alone is not enough. You can name the wound, define a new identity, recite the affirmations — but if your lived experience does not match the story, the body defaults to what is familiar.
Familiarity is not fact. It is repetition.
When the habit of acting like I was worthy of getting stronger became familiar, the belief that I was worthy was no longer a question—it was simply known.
Fear of being unworthy had been the captain of my life. I had given my inner critic total authority to lead. I was so controlled by criticism that for most of my life, I thought my brain was set to destroy me. But my brain was always on my side. It was only fighting me because I had been using it as a weapon.
It was not until I actively stopped engaging in the fight that I had an opportunity to see myself as anything more than a fighter.
The same weapon was now a tool.
When the internal warfare ceased, I became suddenly aware of how my posture had contorted into what I'd put into it. All the pressure I had compressed into form trying to keep myself under control was now boundless and unrestrained.
When I climbed out of my armor, it became obvious what my devotion to struggle was costing me. The life I was striving for required so much effort that I had forgotten everything else I carried.
I never considered that the same fear that was driving me to seek love was also holding me from it. I didn’t believe that everything I searched for could be resolved by simply no longer being someone at war with themselves.
The real work was absolving myself of the need to resolve every friction and instead, integrating with a new orientation.
Effortless posture is not fixed or rigid. It’s a position of no longer holding, but allowing.
I was able to drop out of the resistance enough to see how I had mistaken my critic for my identity. The more I unattached from this vice, the more I saw that it was only one voice among many.
The loudest voices were those of fear. They judged, criticized, measured, and corrected. But underneath the noise, I found a compassionate observer.
It was the presence that has been quietly keeping company with you the whole time. Witnessing, unabashedly and unflinching through every storm. It sits beside each experience, never advancing or withdrawing, just staying.
You find it in the fraction of space that exists between “this is happening” and “I am this.” You meet it by lingering in the pause you want to rush through. You know it by staying in the gap you have been trying to avoid just one beat longer than usual.
When the war stops, you see more clearly how you are not what you achieve externally, but what you stop being internally.
People can only meet you at the depth they have met themselves. Our ability to love others is limited or expanded by how deeply we’ve learned to love ourselves. And so too is acceptance, belonging, respect, and every other thing we keep looking for outside ourselves — it all starts with us.
I am still in the process of deepening my experience with myself. I always will be. That is more of a relief now that I’m no longer exhausted by my expectation of achieving it.
The process is a relationship, not a possession.
I am still working on sitting inside my reactivity instead of pouncing on it to prove something.
I am still working on letting it be, on letting me be, without imposing what I could or should do just because I can.
I am still learning to hold desire and ambition without rejecting either entirely.
I so badly want to jump into life the way I always have and get things done. But not everything is for me. Now, I most powerfully want to get the right things done.
Not every opportunity is an obligation.
Not everything we carry needs a cure.
The relief of being in process is that you are allowed to be in motion without having to justify the motion with arrival. Not being done means that nothing is over. This is not permanent, nor are you or I. We are participating in something that is still forming.
I used to think the goal of life was to fulfill my potential, now I think the goal is simply to experience what it means to be alive.
I want to know what it’s like to really be here, in my life instead of outside of it, tallying each moment and appraising its usefulness.
There is no usefulness. There is no potential. There is only contact, depth, intensity, presence.
You don’t stand outside your life collecting markers of it to measure your progress. To really live life, you must enter it, and let it enter you. The experience you feel is evidence that the meeting happened.
And the depth to which you meet yourself is the very same to which you can meet life.
༄ Measuring less, meeting more — SJT