You're Not That Great by Elan Gale

Author:Elan Gale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2017-12-05T05:00:00+00:00

chapter six

the dangers of thinking you’re great

Whenever I’m starting to feel too confident or good about myself I like to play a recording of my own speaking voice. Unless you’re Scarlett Johansson, nothing takes you back to zero faster than hearing what your voice actually sounds like.

—Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (writer)

At this point you may still be thinking, “I actually do think I’m pretty great. What’s wrong with that? I’m not hurting anyone!”

Wrong. You are. You’re hurting yourself and you’re hurting everyone around you. Your endless stream of self-love makes you completely unbearable to be around and your satisfaction makes you stagnant and useless. Life is a rushing river with refreshing water and endless twists and turns. But right now you’re a dirty lake full of brain-eating amoebas and dead fish.

I know you’re not convinced. I know there’s a part of you that feels like the confidence you get from thinking you’re better than you are makes you happier and more pleasant to be around and motivated to get out of bed and face the day each morning with all the energy of a Jack Russell terrier that just drank a bucket of espresso. But while you might think you’re taking on the world, you’re actually just barking up the wrong tree and peeing on your own feet in the mud.

The number one problem that results from thinking you’re great is that you gravely miscalculate what you deserve. As a result, you end up giving up or, even worse, getting desperate and settling.

Let’s take a second and think about unicorns. Unicorns are fucking delightful. You’ve never seen or even heard of a unicorn that wasn’t glorious. Long, sturdy legs and rippling lean muscles under a perfect and silky coat. Sometimes they can fly. Sometimes they can talk. They obviously have a pretty legit glam squad because they turn and whip their manes around and a record scratches and the party stops like Beyoncé just walked into the room.

Seemingly, there is nothing at all wrong with unicorns. They are perfect beings.

Oh, except for one thing: they don’t fucking exist.

When you think you’re great, you spend your time looking for unicorns. You think you’re pretty damn special and that you deserve the very best. In fact, you believe that you deserve perfection. You think you deserve a unicorn.

This causes two problems. The obvious one is that you’re wandering around like an idiot looking for a mythical creature. The less obvious one is that you have delegitimized and devalued the things in your world that are good and are worth desiring.

Because you know what a unicorn is? A unicorn is just a horse with a cone-shaped tumor on its head. As you wander the prairies searching for the elusive unicorn, you literally just walked by a million unbelievable horses and missed your shot with those horses (and as a bonus, you made the horses feel like shit about themselves). All the things that make unicorns cool are also present in horses, except for the

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