Embrace Your Insecurities, Exceed Your Love Limits: Day 0

“Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance. Seriously,”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

Insecurity acts like a closed door, shutting you off from flowing love through it and exploring what lies beyond. So what happens if you deliberately open that door? Not necessarily to overcome your insecurity, but to become the person who's capable of opening that door.

You can't just waltz up to your insecurities and say, "Your services are no longer required." You actually have to grow enough to get to a place where you can see them differently. Where you can see them as opportunities instead of fears. And once you're willing to embrace those opportunities, and look past the temporary struggle to reveal the long term gains, insecurity loses it's power. It is revealed for what it truly is. Just something you haven't learned how to love yet.

Love is a volatile force. It can drive people to insane measures of devotion, or delusion. It can make the smallest thing seem all-important, or render your whole life meaningless by comparison. You could feel completely in love one moment, then turn mean and nasty the moment you feel rejected.

Whether or not we love something has little to do with how lovable that thing actually is, and much more to do with our willingness to see it in a lovable light. Love is like running water. It spends the majority of its life bottled up inside of us, waiting for an excuse to pour out. Sure, we need it to sustain life as we know it, and occasionally we’ll even shower ourselves in it. But most of the time we ignore it and take it for granted. Because life is easier when love is controlled.

That control is a double-edged sword. It allows us to feel free and autonomous. But it also cuts us off from the greater possibility of who we could be. Who would you be if you let go of everything that’s holding you back? I’ll tell you who you’d be. You’d be out of control. With nothing to hold onto, life will take you where it pleases. Whether or not you’ll like where you end up is a matter of how easily you can see the good in that which you’re unfamiliar with. This is why it’s so hard for many of us to let go. We value familiarity over uncertainty, even when we’re certain that we’re not content where we are.

This post is subtitled “Day 0” because it’s the preface to a 30 day experiment. 30 days of embracing insecurity and exceeding love limits. The goal isn't to be secure about everything. It's to figure out what doors are currently closed off in your life that you'd rather have open. Then send a security team to bust through those doors and discover what's on the other side.

Being Secure In Your Insecurities

How do you feel secure about something that threatens life as you know it? That’s easy (and tough at the same time). You give yourself permission to open that door of uncertainty and accept what’s on the other side. Rather than clinging to what you know, you embrace what you don’t know. No matter how sure you are of what lies beyond that door, you won’t know until you open it. The goal of the experiment is not to reach some enlightened place where you’ve finally figured your life out. But to open those doors of uncertainty, and let reality enlighten you as to what lies on the other side.

Love is the fruit of life. Insecurity is feeling like you don’t have permission to pluck it. But love is not something outside of you that you need permission to grab. It’s something within you that you need permission to flow.

We feel insecure because we think something we can’t easily change is preventing us from something we so desperately want. So we distract ourselves by trying to become something we’re not, instead of allowing ourselves to own who we already are. If you let got of the notion that there’s something wrong with you, you can embrace and build upon everything that’s right with you.

Video Introduction & Intention Setting

Backstory: Exceed Your Love Limits

This experiment was largely inspired by a friend who got in my face and really asked me to sit down and think about who I really am and define what I want to be.

He said:

Who the fuck is your essence and what is your deal?
How can you go express that deal out in the real world RIGHT NOW?
How can you tangibly say: THIS is why what I'm doing is important and PROFOUND.

My response was:

This is hard for me. Defining myself has always been hard. The moment I define myself one way I feel cut off from all the other possibilities of who I could be. But that actually answers my question. I don't want to feel limited because I am limitless. I am limitless and my essence is love. I am Limitless Love.

And how could I express that in the real world right now? By finding where we collectively limit our love and exceeding that limit. Or by finding where I personally limit my love and exceeding that limit.

This is profound because love limits are the root of conditional love. They are the control valves that tell us who we can and cannot be. The moment we violate these limits, and love what we're not supposed to love, is the moment we become the true author of our lives.

There's this great quote from the movie 'Adaptation.' "You are who you love. Not who loves you." That flies in the face of traditional views of unrequited love. If we give love that isn't given back, we're not loving in the wrong, we're simply loving. Love itself is the gift we give ourselves everytime we allow ourselves to love. Because love cannot flow through you if you do not let it in first. You are a vessel of love and every time you love something love fills you up at the same rate at which it pours out of you.

That's the crazy thing about love. It knows no limit because it paves its own path. Love can take us anywhere we're wanting to go so long as we can love what we find on the way. Love is what fuels us. Stop loving and you'll run out of gas.

People talk about doing what they love as if it's something they have to find first. But doing what you love is about loving what you do. And loving is simply reasons to love minus reasons not to love. Get rid of your reasons not to love and you could love anything. Give in to your reason to love even more and you will be led to your true calling.

I have found my true calling. I am Limitless Love. I am here to help you exceed your love limits. You deserve the best that love and life have to offer. You deserve more than you could ever earn. There's only one question that matters right now. "Where are your love limits and what lies beyond them?"

Now I'm trying to take this initial burst of excitement and transform it into lasting change. By working through my own limits I can learn what works and what doesn't and then share that knowledge with a broader audience.

Rules of Engagement

When devising an experiment meant to change your life, it’s always wise to take into account the resistance you’re likely to put up. While a part of you may feel ripe and ready to expand into something new, another part of you will resist that expansion with everything it’s got, choosing to cling to the things that can easily be enjoyed right now, instead of building the things that will bring you joy in the future.

For this experiment the goal is simply to open the doors of insecurity and let love flood through. So the only real challenge will be in opening the door. But what’s going to prevent me from saying, “Hell no! That door is too scary?”

Since I don’t know what lies on the other side, there’s no guarantee that there’ll be a reward awaiting me. Therefore my motivation should be what reward I will get by opening the door itself.

Originally I wanted to list out all of my insecurities and vow to tackle them one by one, but as I started making the list I began to feel outnumbered. There were so many of them and only one of me. So instead I decided that I’ll take these on one at a time, and to make sure I maintain momentum throughout I will declare my focus a day ahead of time, so when I wake up in the morning the only thing on my plate is to address what I put there the night before. At the end of every post from Day 0 to Day 29 I’ll right out the focus for tomorrow. If for some reason I run out of insecurities, then I’ll begin focusing on what I want to do in the absence of insecurity. Where I want to spread my newly freed love.

The goal of the experiment is not to write something worth reading. Or to attract new followers. Or to evolve into some ultra-lovable version of myself. It’s just to open those doors and lot love pour through, and see where the journey takes me in the process.

Tomorrow’s Focus

Oh shit. This is where it gets real. Where I have to own up to where I’m holding myself back and let go of the lever that gives me sole control of whether the door stays open or shut.

Like I said early, the reward for opening the door is not what may be found on the other side, but who I’ll become in the process of opening it. So this first door will give me the opportunity to:

• Grow comfortable being judged, negatively or positively.
• Love myself for who I really am, not just the version of me that’s most widely accepted.
• Let my outer identify more closely match my inner identity.
• Feel more free to identify differently in the future.

I will get all these benefits and more just by opening Door #1. And what’s behind Door #1?

Door #1: Embracing My Bisexuality

I have known for a long time that I’m hetero-flexible, but I have almost exclusively chosen to live my life as a straight man. I can’t say that I have a strong desire to explore bisexuality, but I can say that I have a strong resistance preventing me from wanting to. I'm not sure what embracing my bisexuality looks like, other than that I know that I have the capacity to love men in a similar fashion to the way I love women, but the fact that I suppress that side of myself must mean it's generally outside of my comfort zone. Even though I'm totally comfortable and supportive of other people being gay or bisexual, it just feels like it's not OK for me. Like I would feel shame and resistance, and that I'm being judged.

It's a poor excuse to let the shitty opinions of others dictate your decisions, so hopefully by embracing my bisexuality I will feel more comfortable making controversial decisions that align with my values, even if they don't align with others. But when it comes down to it, there's probably way more imagined resistance in my mind than people who actually give a fuck about who I pursue romantically. So this is just an inner battle that I no longer need to wage. Once I can fully and publicly accept this aspect of myself, I will let go of a large piece of resistance that I've held onto for decades. And that can't be anything but a good thing.

Moving Forward

So this is the general outline for how the next 30 days will unfold. Find an insecurity that's holding me back, explore it, dive into the backstory, re-frame my perspective, and create a narrative that matches who I really am, not just who I've been.

If nothing else, I hope to create greater alignment between my inner and outer self. There are so many times where I pretend to be the most agreeable version of myself on the outside, just because I want to maximize my chances and of being likable or not offending someone (which could potentially close doors and opportunities in the future). I'm beginning to realize that I am the one who closes those doors. I close doors just by trying to keep them open with everyone I meet. And the more I practice blending in, the less I stand out, the less I know myself and let others know me. And that is a recipe for being unhappy and unfulfilled.

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Thanks for reading!

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