We can't self-sacrifice ourselves into a state of grace

Self-destruction sucks, especially the righteous kind

To be human is to be trapped in time and chance, and to also be trapped with an urge to escape these features of our condition. Life changes quite a bit for each and every one of us as we go along, and then it ends. We can make choices and guide our lives as best as we can - even if we don’t “ultimately” have free will, we certainly seem to - but so many things happen that are completely beyond our common command. Freak accidents, historical forces, cosmic mysteries, unpredictable people, all of the above and more buffet us about from cradle to grave whether we like it or not. 

You could try and escape this situation through a life of contemplation, turning your attention away from all these ups and downs and towards something, anything, that will never betray and disappoint you. God, Rational Truth, whatever the object is, we feel some desperation to find something that cannot not be there, something that will exist no matter what even when we ourselves do not. We want to shed our time-and-chance-bound being to partake in the existence of something that survives our death, guaranteeing that some part of us will survive our death too and will endure all inevitable pain in the meantime. 

This means turning against those parts of you that remain attached to time-and-chance-bound things, which means turning against those parts of you that are attached to YOU at all. Your self,  your identity, will go away at the end of your life, so being attached to it means being attached to something that’s a waste of energy over the long term. If you aren’t putting your efforts into contributing to something that’s bigger than you then you’re setting yourself up for suffering and failure, and that’s why your life has so much overwhelming pain at its core.

I don’t really like this way of looking at things, or at least I can’t really endorse it in its entirety. Not to say that I didn’t try it on - I did, when I first got sober, thinking that the new point of my life was to somehow self-sacrifice my way into a state of grace. If I hated doing something, or if I deprived myself in order to focus on someone else, then that was a sign that I was doing the noble work of self-destruction. It made me miserable, but I was always miserable, and I thought that now the misery at least had a point. I saw my life as being ruined by my self-indulgence, so I sentenced myself to a lifetime of self-destruction as a correction. I swapped one story about my suffering for another one, rather than asking what life might look like without that kind of suffering. 

Being miserable and burned out all the time didn’t help me contribute to anyone - a reluctant ‘yes’ quickly turns into a resentful ‘yes’ - and left a lot of people feeling weird about interacting with me since I could say yes with my words while the frustration and exhaustion were so intense that they were practically bending the air around my head. I would give in order to get, not consciously doing so but nevertheless expecting that my attention to other people would somehow provide an escape for me from whatever it was within me that I didn’t want to face.

Like it or not, what I’ve found out is that my ‘self’ hasn’t gone away. To be a human, indeed to be a life form at all, is to have needs that need to be met, and when I turn away from my own needs it puts the responsibility on others to meet them for me. I am someone I am responsible for taking care of too! 

Acceptance is the name of the game, for me - accepting my own flaws and finitude, accepting death and pain and baffling forces as part of the human condition, seeing myself as a flawed person among flawed people rather than the only good person alive or the worst human being on the planet. It’s good to contribute to things bigger than me, but if I do so out of desperation to escape myself then everything becomes distorted by that desperation - my work doesn’t contribute and my attempt to escape myself remains forever futile.

I’m going to have a relationship with myself for the rest of my life, so I might as well make that relationship a good one.