Anti-Self Help Project
Trigger warning
The content of this article refers to themes of suicide and religious trauma that may be emotionally challenging.
My ideal self died at home this week after fighting a long and difficult battle with existential disease. Beloved to mentors and rivals alike, she took on many roles and responsibilities throughout her life of selfish service. She leaves behind a complicated legacy with many admirers, but few will mourn her. With her will be buried a lifetime’s worth of hyper-specific dreams and an impressive portfolio of creative self-harm strategies.
Is it morbid to publish an obituary for someone who hasn’t actually died yet? What if the person for whom you wrote the obituary, still stubbornly clinging to her remaining shreds of life, is only dying because you are the one killing her?
Here is my murder confession, in brief:
I am killing my ideal self. I will be as kind and as brutal as proves necessary. I will feel no remorse. I will face the consequences of my actions with strength and most of all, with relief.
This website is now the home of something I have been referring to as the “Anti Self-Help Project.” It will serve as an archive of my explorations as well as a dynamic representation of my conception of self. Although it has been taking shape in my thoughts for many years, I’ve procrastinated taking any action towards formalizing the project, because my expectations of a grand debut always exceeded my practical abilities. Before I ever wrote these words, I:
Purchased a domain and absorbed my long-dormant personal website into it,
Made social media accounts under the Anti-Self-Help name (objective of this step is unclear),
Created an email address and file architecture for non-existent content,
Started a book club, my enthusiasm for which quickly fizzled.
I usually find the planning of everything to be far easier than the execution of anything, and driving myself to the point of burnout to be far easier than pursuing work at a reasonable pace. My personal willpower has the inertia of a freight train with no engine and no brakes. Mine is a life littered with half-built spreadsheet macros and haphazardly slotted into productivity frameworks with the crucial bits labeled “your content here.” Forget prototyping, drafting, seeking feedback, revising - if I can’t provide a polished product at first go, I’d rather never share anything at all.
It’s time to make some mechanical updates to my train. Maybe I can offload a few rusty cars along the way.
It may sound like I’m setting up for a treatise on perfectionism, but I don’t think of it that way. I’ve never liked the term “perfectionism” because to me, it conjures images of high-achieving women with gym memberships and a love of Brené Brown quotes. I don’t think I’m a perfectionist. I think I’m a navel-gazing neurotic with a penchant for overcommitting and an allergy to following through. Debating the semantics (and examining my own biases) would be an irrelevant exercise here, because I realized recently that my real issue with perfectionism isn’t that I don’t personally identify with the label. My problem is the presupposition that perfection exists. Every advice I have read on conquering perfectionism involves letting go of so-called “unattainable ideals.” I now believe that not only are goals of perfection unattainable, but they are foundationally nonsensical.
Every theorem is beholden to a fundamental set of assumptions. Once those assumptions are identified, they can be tested, built upon or even rejected entirely. Remove them, and everything– from the fundamental idea to the most tangential of conclusions– will dissolve into irrelevancy.
I have lost one of the core assumptions around which I built my life to date. I have grown to reject, and consequently decided to murder, the optimal self.
In early 2021, I had a traumatic experience, the story of which is not mine to tell. In its aftermath, struggling to regain my footing as time rolled along in chaos, virtually every element of life as I knew it seemed to unravel. My husband, separated from me by a pandemic and a few thousand miles, wouldn’t receive his green card and move into the apartment that I had told my landlord we were cohabitating in for several more months, and I was beginning to question the wisdom of committing to such an uncertain future. I could no longer ignore the mounting pressure of cognitive dissonance and knew I must choose between my conscience and my lifelong faith. A demanding workload at my job and my final semester of university were at war with my inability to perform basic functions like feeding myself. I detached from active participation in reality and watched time drag me across finish line after finish line. Graduation. Reunion. Relocation. Initiation. Success, success, success.
I hated success.
After a year of life happening without my consent, my beleaguered train finally left its rails. All conscious thought was replaced by a hollow echoing in my mind. I don’t have the energy to keep being alive. I am going to quit everything or I will throw myself into oncoming traffic. Or perhaps I would take the pills I hid in my bedside stand several months earlier. Maybe I would open the back door, vault over the balcony, and run in any direction until my asthmatic lungs gave out in disgust. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the need to escape.
***
The introduction to Samuel Smiles’s 1859 book Self-Help depicts the beginnings of the self-help movement as the author remembers it: “some fifteen years” before, a group of industrious young men gathered in a dingy apartment and taught each other how to live more productively. “Those who knew a little taught those who knew less—improving themselves while they improved the others; and, at all events, setting before them a good working example¹.” This is a structure that we find familiar over two and a half centuries later. How many support groups, workshops, peer reviews, book clubs and mutual improvement societies are there in the ecosystems you inhabit? I can think of at least a dozen I could attend this month if I chose.
Self-Help reads like a manual for the aspiring gentleman. Its chapters consist mainly of abridged history lessons, context for simple parables that underscore principles of moral virtue. Its premise is that the circumstances of a person’s life are determined in large part by his effort and virtue. This reflected a popular attitude in mid-Victorian England, where the boundaries of class were becoming more porous and the average (white, male) person could now attain upward mobility on his own merit, at least in theory.
The small flame cultivated by Smiles and his contemporaries found suitably flammable ground in Protestant rugged individualism and prosperity gospel values and plenty of fuel in the growth of secular spiritual practices that rushed in to fill the vacuum left by decline in traditional religious activity. The self-improvement concept has evolved over time into the dystopian-sounding Wellness movement, an expansive behemoth comprising everything from nutrition to sleep hygiene to emotional resilience. McKinsey estimated the size of the wellness industry in 2021 to be $1.5 trillion and growing at a rate of five to ten percent annually². This is roughly as large as the GDP of Spain in that same year³.
The way self-help as a commercial industry and social phenomenon is framed has evolved with popular attitudes over time. Topics, target audiences, and methodologies vary. Personally, I am obsessed with the “life coach” phenomenon in the same morbidly detached way that many people view true crime. Whatever form it takes, the founding principle of self-help is still the pursuit of an ideal state.
Wealthy. Organized. Peaceful. Healthy. Charming. Informed.
Happy.
Perfect.
Be ye therefore perfect. And because perfection is a hollow specter forever hovering at the edge of your peripheral vision, be ye therefore cursed to spend your mortality chasing a ghost.
I always considered myself to be immune to the wiles of self-help/wellness culture. I scoffed at people who read books like How to Win Friends and Influence People or Girl, Wash Your Face. I’ve been an outspoken critic of dishonest health influencers and pseudoscientific nutrition fads for years. It turns out that just like when people assert that advertising has no effect on them (I’m also guilty of this), this is bullshit. No person is so intelligent or so dispassionate that they’re no longer subject to human psychology.
***
By the spring of 2022, my entire identity had been razed and I was disconnected from most of what defined my self-concept. My meticulous resumé-oriented existence now felt like a lifetime of tilting at windmills. Clearly, whatever I had been doing to hold myself together for the last couple of decades was not going to work anymore. I decided I was willing to try anything to build a new functional self, no matter how uncomfortable it made me.
For the millionth time, I decided not to kill myself. For the first time, I promised never to kill myself. I quit my job. I started over. I allowed myself to be helped.
As a lifelong member of the Mormon faith, I was trained to view all of mortal human existence through the lens of the great battle between good and evil. I internalized this lesson so deeply that every premeditated action I take is calculated to injure my evil self and empower my ideal self. Every element of my life was moralized and elevated to hold eternal significance. Ideal Self would never let executive dysfunction overpower her. Ideal Self had infinite capacity for giving and never caused harm. One day, I knew, I could defeat my horde of major demons and minor foibles and win the honor of stepping into Her being. I would win the highly coveted honor of deserving to exist. All it would take is every single ounce of my willpower, effort, and emotional well-being.
For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father. - King Benjamin, The Book of Mormon⁴
A key aspect of my religious deconstruction has been the dismantling of perfection and embracing the natural [wo]man. I no longer have faith in the Ideal. I described the past three years or so of my life to my current therapist during our first meeting as “The Great Unclenching of Fists.” I am teaching myself to choose fewer battles and to stop perceiving myself as my life’s chief antagonist. I am rejecting the dichotomy of self-help and selfless service and integrating elements of both into my new role as Human Self. I am emulsifying dissonant truths with careful recklessness and discarding whatever feels spoiled.
Earlier iterations of the idea for this blog were called “The Dunning-Kruger Chronicles,” a reflection of the original intent to research topics that fascinated me and write a non-comprehensive editorial on each topic. I moved away from that concept because I want to focus on personal application more than on purely conveying a viewpoint, but I have retained the intent to learn a little about something I care a lot about and attempt to slot it into my burgeoning worldview. Think of it like the scratchpad for my living manifesto.
My main reason for sharing publicly is to prevent myself from getting paralyzed by perfection. Until I can reestablish an internal rhythm and overcome the need for external motivators, this will be my accountability. There are no cheat codes or perfect systems, no Silicon Valley-worthy life hacks. There is only doing, seeking help, and doing again.
Here is how I expect the Anti-Self-Help project to unfold: to begin with, it will consist of a series of essays like this one. I have a long and growing list of topics that have been demanding my disciplined attention. I will be maintaining a list of those topics here that I will keep public just for fun, but not every topic will end up as an essay.
Over time, I hope to expand into more involved content, such as life experiments and fictional narrative writing projects. These are my only rules:
I am the intended audience. I must write with that understanding and not with the intent of appealing to an external audience.
I must complete each essay consecutively and not simultaneously. I will finish a task before beginning a new one.
I will approach every idea with as open a perspective as I can, remembering that I am likely to find good, bad, agreement, and disagreement in anything I explore.
I reject conventional “self-help” culture - hence the project name. I will not attempt to generalize my observations to have universal application. I will not resort to watered-down platitudes in order to become more relatable.
I do not assume a position of expertise on anything and I encourage readers not to accept any of my premises or conclusions without questioning them.
I will be as honest and direct as I can be. I will not resort to sarcasm, false humility, and self-deprecation to shield myself from vulnerability.
I will not attempt to create a polished product before I publish. I will make a reasonable attempt to revise and edit for readability.
I will make every effort to publish each essay in the expected timeline, whether I consider it to be complete or not.
Thank you for reading these thoughts. I have no grand expectations for this blog. There are no plans to reach a market or build a brand of any kind. I am primarily writing for my own benefit, to document the evolution of my thoughts, but I do hope that there is an audience, however small, for whom my observations would be interesting and even useful. I would be honored if you continue to humor me with your time, but I would not be offended if you do not. Go give your precious little energy to building your own castles.