the Evolution of Self-Harm III; Self-Sabotage

Self-sabotage is rarely loud. It's not fireworks and explosions. It’s quiet. It's that soft, persistent hum of doubt that plays just underneath your wins, your progress. It's a compilation of bad character traits—or rather, misunderstood habits formed in survival, masked as personality. It's inconsistency dressed as spontaneity. It's hesitation mistaken for humility. It's pride acting as a decoy for pain.

You find yourself in moments you once prayed for, and yet something in you whispers, "Are you sure you're supposed to be here?"
So in a twisted act of self-preservation—of misguided good faith—you ruin it. You reply late. You shut down emotionally. You hold back when you should lean in. You flee love before it can reveal you. You delay progress before it demands accountability. And in the ruins, there's a strange comfort. A sick, sweet familiarity of being unchosen. Of confirming the belief that you were never enough in the first place. 

The Greeks had a word for this: Atë—a kind of ruin that follows hubris. The gods watched mortals fall to their own undoing, not because they were evil, but because they could not believe they were worthy of something divine. That’s the tragedy. That we are often the architects of our own suffering, chiseling away at joy with the sharp tools of self-doubt, and convincing ourselves we were right to predict that ruin.

Plato once wrote that the soul is drawn to truth, to goodness, to beauty—but we have to train it to see clearly. And maybe that’s the work. Learning to trust yourself again. To give your present self the same grace you give your past. To untangle protection from sabotage. To believe that love and success and all the good things that come your way, in their most honest form, don't demand perfection, just presence. 

Self-sabotage isn’t who you are. It’s just an old friend who’s overstayed their welcome. And maybe today, you finally open the door and say, “Thank you for protecting me back then. But I no longer need you now.” 

Because you are okay with being right about the ruin, that maybe you didn't deserve it. But you have to see that its selfish. That you are denying expertise to a job you just might have been really great at, you are denying love to someone who wanted to be loved by you. It doesn't matter whether it doesn't pan out in the end, that's just how life works. But to deny yourself, the people around you and ultimately the world of yourself is selfish. If for a moment you thought, it's okay to be selfish, not the time. Put yourself out there, you deserve it, they deserve you.