What The Hell Am I Doing?
Let Yourself Be A Fraud.
One thing I’ve learned over the past three years growing the Academy of Self Help to half a million followers is that every single one of us is sometimes deeply insecure.
Authors, therapists, influencers, everyday people from all walks of life—each one of us has moments, sometimes many moments, where we find ourselves in complete inner chaos, wondering: what the hell am I doing? What am I doing as a parent? What am I doing as a creative? As a partner? As an employer or employee? What the hell am I doing as a human?
But what fascinates me most about it all is that no matter how successful someone becomes, no matter how many people sing their praises, how many social media followers they have or how far along their own own healing journey they are, all of them sometime feel like a complete and total fraud.
The lesson I’ve taken away from this is that my own insecurities, and probably yours too, aren’t as special as we’ve made them out to be. They’re not particularly unique, they’re definitely not uncommon, and most importantly, they don’t have the inherent power to keep us from our dreams—since everyone who’s already “made it” still has theirs.
And if that’s the case, if our self-doubt is destined to stay with us forever, maybe the goal shouldn’t be to eliminate it completely, but rather to just keep moving through it.
Maybe our aim doesn’t have to be to fix everything that ails us, but to continue creating, continue loving, continue connecting, in spite of what the voice inside our head says.
Maybe our lives are like the end of the movie A Beautiful Mind; it’s not that Russell Crowe no longer sees or hears the hallucinations, it’s that he makes the choice to no longer acknowledge them, no matter how loud they get.
Maybe progress doesn’t have to mean completely changing who we are—maybe it can be as simple as making one different decision, over and over again.
Maybe 2025 is the year we embrace the messy, imperfect process of becoming who we were meant to be.
Maybe 2025 is the year we learn to coexist with our insecurities, instead of letting them define us.
Maybe 2025 is the year that we finally give ourselves permission to show up exactly as we are.
Maybe, just maybe, 2025 is the year we change our lives forever by making one different choice over and over again: acting as if we are enough, even when we don’t feel it.
Happy holidays my friends, here’s to a beautiful year of just being ourselves.
- Will Watson
Looking for a stocking stuffer from the heart, check out my new book As Far As I Can Tell.
Instead of waiting for self-doubt to disappear, maybe the key is learning to move forward with it. To create anyway. To love anyway. To show up anyway.