Maybe I Am Tired of Trying to Become Better

There is always something waiting in the background of my mind, quietly reminding me that I could be doing better. I could be more disciplined. I could be more consistent. I could be more productive. I could be further ahead. Sometimes the voice is motivational, and sometimes it is cruel, but it almost always leaves me with the same feeling that there is something about me that still needs to be fixed. I think I have spent so much of my life believing that becoming a better version of myself was the goal that I rarely stopped to ask whether constantly trying to improve myself was making me happier. At what point does growth stop being growth and become another reason to dislike the person you are today?

I found myself thinking about this when I decided to deactivate my personal social media accounts again. This time, it was not because I had stopped enjoying social media or because something particularly bad had happened. In fact, I had been sharing something I genuinely love. I had been writing, talking about psychology, sharing my thoughts, and connecting with people in a way that felt very much like me. I met some genuinely kind and down-to-earth people, and for a while, it felt good to simply express myself. Then I started sharing book reviews and slowly began feeling the pressure that comes with being visible. I started thinking about whether I was posting enough or perhaps posting too much. I started thinking about what my stories looked like, whether they felt curated enough, whether I was maintaining the aesthetic I had created in my head. I love beautiful, intentional spaces, and I realised that even something as simple as posting on Instagram had started becoming another thing I could measure myself against. I was no longer simply sharing because I wanted to share. I was thinking about consistency, engagement, presentation, and whether I was doing enough. Somewhere along the way, something I enjoyed had become another performance.

The strange thing is that I already have enough going on. I am working on rebranding and preparing to relaunch my holistic wellness brand, something I originally started in 2021. I am running a digital social magazine where I research and write about people I believe are doing meaningful and inspiring work in their fields and communities. I am writing, creating, researching, building and trying to figure out what the next chapter of my life is supposed to look like. Yet somehow, I had convinced myself that I also needed to maintain a personal social media presence on top of everything else. I could feel the anxiety building slowly. Nothing dramatic happened. It was simply the accumulation of small pressures until I realised I did not want another part of my life making me feel as though I was failing. So I stepped back. And perhaps what surprised me most was that stepping away did not feel like failure. It felt like listening to myself. I think we have become so accustomed to pushing through discomfort that we sometimes forget there is wisdom in stopping. We have made productivity sound like virtue and rest sound like weakness. We celebrate people who are always building, always achieving, always working towards the next thing, but perhaps sometimes the most honest thing you can say is, "This is too much for me right now.”

I also started thinking about how easily self-improvement can become self-rejection. We are constantly told to become better versions of ourselves, and on the surface, there is nothing wrong with that. I want to grow. I want to learn. I want to become wiser. I have dreams and goals that matter deeply to me. But there is a subtle message hidden inside so much of the language around self-improvement, and it is that who you are right now is somehow insufficient. There is always another habit to build, another goal to reach, another part of yourself to heal, another level of success to achieve. You can accomplish something you worked incredibly hard for and almost immediately start thinking about what comes next. You can reach the destination and discover that you have already moved the finish line. Psychologists sometimes refer to this as the arrival fallacy, the belief that happiness and fulfilment are waiting for us just beyond the next achievement. I recognise that feeling. I have had moments where I thought, once this happens, I will finally feel settled, only to arrive there and realise I was already thinking about the next thing. It makes me wonder how much of my life I have spent preparing to finally become someone I would be proud of instead of learning to appreciate the woman who is already here.

Maybe this is why I have become more interested in the difference between ambition and pressure. I am still ambitious. I still want to build my businesses. I still want to write. I still want to create beautiful things. I still want financial independence and a life that feels meaningful to me. I have not suddenly decided that goals do not matter. What I am questioning is whether I need to bully myself into achieving them. There are days when I genuinely need discipline, and there are days when I need rest. There are moments when I am procrastinating and need to be honest with myself, but there are also moments when I am overwhelmed and calling myself lazy only makes everything heavier. I think we are sometimes too quick to turn every struggle into a character flaw. Maybe I am not always lazy. Maybe sometimes I am tired. Maybe I am not always inconsistent. Maybe sometimes I am changing direction because I have discovered that something no longer fits. Maybe I am not falling behind. Maybe my life simply does not move according to the timeline I created for myself when I was younger.

I think what I am learning now is that I do not want my entire life to feel like a project that needs constant improvement. I want to be able to enjoy things without immediately asking what they can become. I want to read a book because I love reading, not because I need to turn every book into content. I want to write because something inside me needs to be expressed, not because I need to maintain an online presence. I want to build my businesses without feeling as though every quiet season means I am failing. I want to be able to disappear from social media when I need to without feeling guilty about losing momentum. I want to rest without having to earn it first. I want to have days where nothing impressive happens. I want to remember that my life is not only valuable when I am producing something. Perhaps there is a version of discipline that looks like knowing when to stop. Perhaps there is a version of ambition that leaves room for peace. Perhaps growth can sometimes mean becoming kinder to yourself rather than demanding more from yourself.

I do not think I am finished growing, and I do not think I ever will be. There are still things about myself I want to change, habits I want to build, and dreams I want to pursue. But I am beginning to wonder whether I need to become a completely different woman before I am allowed to feel proud of the one I am today. Maybe I can be unfinished and still be worthy. Maybe I can have goals I have not reached and still be doing well. Maybe I can make mistakes and still be learning. Maybe I can step away from something without calling myself a failure. Maybe I can have a quiet season without assuming that I am wasting my life. I think I am tired of fighting myself into becoming someone I believe I am supposed to be. I want to learn how to trust the woman I already am. The woman who is still rebuilding. The woman who is still figuring things out. The woman who sometimes gets overwhelmed and needs to close the apps, go quiet, and breathe. Maybe I do not need to become a better version of myself today. Maybe today, I just need to be here, fully and honestly, and recognise that this version of me deserves some tenderness too.