Self-Affirmation

You’re on the right path. 

Maybe I’m not. 

Everything is going to be okay. 

Perhaps it isn’t. 

Believe in yourself. 

It could be that I’m wrong. 

Whenever we seek to offer affirmations, whether invoking these sanguine notions of self-worth and blind optimism within our own mind or that of others, we must not blithely assume that it’s for everyone. 

For some, self-affirmation undermines a heuristic approach to life; for those who have haplessly struggled and toiled their entire lives on the wrong path, when everything wasn’t okay, and whose beliefs were constantly proven to be untrue time and time again, the last thing they should be doing is obstinately continue doing whatever they were doing. The last thing we should be doing is encouraging them that they just need to persist with the same things that were the very reason why they’re in such an unfortunate place in life; to do so would be naive, insensitive, and cruel. 

Surely, we should self-affirm when we know we’re doing the right thing, but, again, how can we be so sure, especially when we’re wrestling with such an elusive and complicated notion of what is right for us? In this world that is seldom clear-cut, black and white, and straightforward, and often is instead incredibly nuanced, paradoxical, and absurd, constant self-affirmation is only an obstacle to truth. 

I’m not going to deny the efficacy of the delusion for those that truly do benefit from self-affirmation, but some of us simply need to hear the hard truths in life—that we’ve been walking the wrong path, that things will very likely not be okay, that we shouldn’t believe in ourselves because we’re wrong—to spur us into doing what’s right. 

Optimism has the capacity to be far more detrimental and inimical to our progress as human beings than realism. Sometimes what something should be hurts us more than what simply is.