Drowning in a sea of me

I’m this episode I share my experiences with self-obsession. Specifically, what does that look like for me? In what ways have I been self-obsessive? What happens when I self-obsess? What does it look like now?

Transcript

Understanding Self-Obsession

Amjed 0:01

Drowning in a Sea of Me . In today's episode I share a little bit about self-obsession , what that's done for me , how it's impacted me and what that really looks like , because it's an easy phrase , it's an easy statement to say or concept to throw out there self-obsession what exactly does that look like ? And so in my life I've shared some examples of how self-obsession has really manifested itself and sometimes still continues to plague me . So I hope you get some benefit out of today . Hi , this is Amjad , a simple , beautifully broken man living in a complex world . Join me as I navigate the dark and bright spots of life , sharing vulnerably and reflecting deeply along the way . May you find some benefit here . That is through me , not from me . I must warn you to enter at your own risk , for in this room my humanity is showing . Welcome , my fellow humans , to episode 47 of my Humanity is Showing .

Amjed 1:16

And for those of you who were looking for apologies for not posting last week , the previous episode . I was pretty sick and then I just anyway , I'm not going to give my excuses , but yeah , I'm feeling much better now . I still have a little bit of a cough , so I'm not sure if I'm going to cough during this episode , but definitely doing better than I was the last couple of weeks , so just really grateful to be back and back online . So for today's episode , I it's a topic that's been coming up a lot lately in my conversations with others , as I've been sharing my journey , and so I thought it would be good to share here as well . I can't remember if I've talked about it before or what context , but I thought I could go into a little bit more detail , even if I've mentioned it before , and that is this idea of self-obsession .

Amjed 2:19

I did not realize that I was self-obsessed . I spent most of my life believing that I was a very humble person and I prided myself on my humility , and my definition of humility for most of my life was that I thought very low of myself , very little of myself , and someone once said that that is humiliation , not humility . And that's exactly what I did for decades Lots and lots and lots of humiliation , lots of self-deprecation and just self-loathing , lots of abuse . And I often say , if I treated anyone else the way I treated myself , or have treated myself most of my life , I would spend many , many years in jail because I was very abusive , very , very abusive to myself and I considered it , I justified it under the guys or context of humility . I thought this is me being humble . Look , I don't want to get a big head and I don't want to . And I was a hard parent and head teacher because have this overinflated ego that thinks that I'm so wonderful .

Amjed 3:56

But in reality , what I was doing actually had someone tell me one time this is pride in reverse , and I've shared about that before , in February of 2007, . That was the sentence or the discussion that turned things around , when this person told me that I'm a very arrogant person and I thought what , how can I be arrogant ? Let me listen to me . I'm telling you how much I despise myself and how low I am and how horrible I am . How is that arrogant ? And he said you're like a little ant that has climbed into the throne of God and appointed yourself as judge , jury and executioner on yourself , and he's like that's pretty arrogant to take on that level of authority yourself . And he said this is pride in reverse . It's a different form of pride . And I did not . It took me . That hit me really hard , but it still took me a while to really grasp what he was saying and what that meant .

Amjed 5:06

So for me , when I say self-obsession , that is any time that I am obsessively thinking about myself . Another way that I put it is I say that when my attention has turned inward rather than outward , when I'm focused on myself rather than how I can be of use to others and be helpful to others , I self-destruct . I do not do well with that . I know maybe some people handle that with grace and are fine to reflect inward and to spend a lot of time focused on themselves . I do not do well with that , and maybe it's because of the way I do reflect a lot now in this kind of new phase of my life . In the last several years , I do a lot of meditation and reflection and pause to think about things , but my energy is usually focused on how , what can I change about myself that would make me of better use to others , which is a slightly different approach . So what does this look like ? And I jotted this down a few days ago because I was telling somebody about it and I said let me just write it down so I'll remember whenever I'm sharing with someone about what I mean when I say self-obsessed .

Amjed 6:37

And for me , self-obsession usually falls into a few different categories . The first category is what will happen to me . What will happen to me ? That's the first category of self-obsession . Will I be successful on this project that I'm working on ? When I was younger it was . Will I ever graduate from this degree and will I be successful once I graduate Well , they graduate successfully . Will I have a good GPA and get a good job lined up afterwards ? Will I ever get married ? Once I got married , will we ever have kids ? Family love me ? Will they accept me ? What is gonna happen to me ? Will I die alone and forgotten and nobody shows up to my funeral ? Will I ? You know , will I , will I , will I . And it's all this , what will happen to me ?

Amjed 7:41

Conversation or thoughts , and this is one form of self-possession for me . As I get fixated on this idea of my future and as I heard one time in a beautiful talk where he said that every time I wander off into the future , I am , I drown , I become overwhelmed with fear , and every time I wander off into the past , I become overwhelmed by resentment . And my God , my higher power , my God , my whatever you wanna call it for me exists in the present and that's where I'm best , that's where I'm in best shape is when I stay in the present . And every time I go into the future or the past , it's like he's standing there saying have a nice trip , I'll see you when you get back . So this , what will happen to me is a like a friend of mine calls it future tripping . You know , it's me wandering off to the future . It's like that Mark Twain quote that says I have survived many horrible things , some of which actually happened . That's the future part . So what will happen to me ?

Amjed 8:52

That's the first category of self-obsession . The second category of self-obsession for me is I deserve this , I deserve a break , I deserve someone to cut me some slack , I deserve to be treated better , I deserve to fill in the blank . And this is another way where you know , I know when I say I deserve , it's this one and the next one . So I'll go ahead and mention the next one , cause they kind of go hand in hand a little bit . The next one is look at how I'm treated , look at the way people are treating me . Oh , I can't believe they said that to me , or you know , they didn't include me in that , or how . How dare they overlook me ?

Amjed 9:38

And in both of these cases , the I deserve and the how I'm treated . Both of these support a victim trap . So for me , it puts me in the position of the victim . I am now the victim because I'm not getting what I deserve and I'm being treated poorly . And in either case , you know , when I get into this victim mode , that's a form of self-obsession . For me , it means my attention is once again pointed inward . So , instead of thinking about how I can be useful , I'm thinking about how the world is treating me , how I'm being treated , and I'm thinking about what , how I should be treated . So

Drowning in a Sea of Me

Amjed 10:20

it's .

Amjed 10:20

I guess that's the two halves of this equation , these two bullets that I'm mentioning . One is how I'm being treated and the other is how I should be treated , what I should get , what I deserve , and so there's the . You know , when I'm the way I'm being treated and when I'm not getting , and it's all about me , it's all about self-focus . And you know , in the cases like in the self-obsession mode , I cannot be humble , because for me , humility is not about today , it's not about beating myself up and making you know , like rubbing my face into the ground and making myself out to be nothing . For me , humility is about . You know , there's , there's that famous quote that says it's not about thinking less of myself , but thinking about myself less . So spending less time thinking about myself and more time thinking about others , versus thinking less of myself and belittling myself and disrespecting myself and abusing myself .

Amjed 11:28

This other one , this is another one . It also falls into the victim thing . These , all three of these go together for me . This third one or this fourth one here , but the third in this category , this grouping , is I have terrible luck and unfortunately , I say this all the time , makes my family really upset .

Amjed 11:49

But I , you know , I say like life sucks , I have such bad luck . There's no point in me doing fill in the blank because I , you know I'm not going to get it anyway because I have such bad luck . As a matter of fact , that's one of the reasons why I have historically had such a hard time flying , because I get on a plane and I'm like I have such bad luck . I have just now put all these people on this plane in jeopardy . I've jeopardized everyone's life on this plane because I have such bad luck , which , you know , my family gets upset because they say that that does not acknowledge that I have such bad luck , knowledge , a lot , all the good things that have happened for me , it's I'm just focused on the things that didn't go my way , that didn't go my way , and so therefore , I quote unquote have bad luck , but there's so many ways that I could say I have really good luck , and but I don't look at that , I don't focus on that , I fixate on the bad luck and you know it's like oh , I have such bad luck , and once again that also puts me in that victim mode .

Amjed 13:05

You know it's , I'm being treated poorly by the people around me , I'm not getting the things I deserve , and I'm being treated badly by fate or by God , in that you know , I have this like horrible luck . So this is so . If I were to lump all these together , I would say like this all all these three fall into the category of I'm a victim , I'm a poor victim of injustice , and so . So that kind of puts us at two categories so far . So there's the what will happen to me , the future part , and then there's the past part , which is you know , look at me , I'm such I have , I'm such a victim here . I'm being abused by the universe , I'm being abused by other people . It's just everything around me is abusing me , when I don't realize that I'm the one who's abusing myself the most .

Amjed 14:09

So the next category I'm going to do it slightly out of order , but the next one for me is that when I start thinking about , I start justifying why I shouldn't be the victim or why I should get these things or why I should be deserved this , and it's because I start over-inflating my , my value and the way I do that is usually that , oh man , I am really good at this , I'm really talented at , or I I mean , how dare they treat me that way ? I'm the best employee they have , or I'm the best father , husband , brother , son that these people could have wished for , and look at how they're treating me . So it's a kind of a self-justification thing that I go through . Where I start thinking about , I start over-exaggerating how well I do things or how good I am at things or whatever that is .

Amjed 15:16

And I know I just talked about how much I abuse myself , but in reality what's happening inside of me at any given moment is a civil war . There's part of my brain that's trying to boost me up , that's trying to tell me you're good , but is overdoing it . And then the other part of my brain is like oh no , that's not true . You're horrible , you're awful , you're the worst . So I go from living on these two extremes at the same time . It's a civil war going on inside my head that says and that's the last category I was gonna bring up which this self-obsession , this pride and reverse of me telling myself how horrible and terrible and awful I am , and the self-abuse that I do , and so it's not balanced in any way . There's this literal civil war going on inside of my head , one part trying to convince me that I'm the best and the other part trying to convince me that I'm the worst .

Amjed 16:18

And one way in that part in particular , one way that I have started to move past that in the last several years , is very simple phrase that I'm an average human being , no better or no worse than anyone else . That when you average us all out , we all fall kind of somewhere in the middle . We're good at some things and we're not so good at other things , and it's okay . It's what makes us human . I'm here showing my humanity , and that's the reality of my humanity is that I'm not the best and I'm not the worst . I'm an all around decent person who's trying to become better , who has flaws , who has strengths , who you know . It all kind of balances itself out . At times I do things well and at other times I do the exact same thing , not so well , and it's all okay . It's all okay .

Amjed 17:15

And so that you know , when I talk about self obsession , it's this idea that I am just spending all my time and energy focused inward and it's like a self like what is that ? Short circuit or you know , self-destruction in a way . But it's like I'm taking a power source and plugging it back into itself and then it's short circuiting and like there's all kinds of sparks and explosion and flames happening because I don't do well when I focus inward , as I mentioned earlier . So the counter to that is for me and this is a prayer of mine that I say God , help me to keep my attention focused outward today . Help me look at how I can be of service in this world , rather than how the world is treating me or how I think I should be or what is going to happen to me . And so with that , as my attention starts to focus outward , and then , you know , I kind of I in that I surrender my obsession with my own fate and I hand that off to my higher power . Say God , you , you take over my future . You take over my past . You take over whether I'm good or bad . Like I'm not gonna worry about all that , I'm just gonna focus my energy on being useful and See where the chips fall and what happens in that .

Amjed 18:55

When I do that is I feel like I become a better version of myself . I Start to value myself more . I start to respect myself more In a balanced way . I'm able to see my flaws , acknowledge them and ask for assistance from God to like work on them and To improve in those areas Without all the abuse . Without all the abuse and in a in a much more balanced way .

Amjed 19:32

And I and it's I'm sometimes surprised at how I'm being I'm able to be used for good . I'm being , I'm able to be used for good when I let go of my self-obsession , when I start focusing my energy and attention outward . I believe that that causes me to be of better service to others , to be of Just a better person in general . And I things , I do things that I didn't know I was capable of , that I don't take credit for . Hence my prayer at the beginning of this that says I asked that what you find here is through me , not from me , because I find that when I channel the positive energy and the and I channel my higher power , it's just . I even surprised myself sometimes at what he's able to do with me , how he's able to use me , as opposed to when I Don't do that , when I'm trying to control the outcome , when I'm trying to like be you know , like show people how good I am , and you know just all self . And so the way I refer to this is in that what I in the title drowning in a sea of me .

Amjed 21:04

I Didn't realize that I spent most of my life suffocating in this self-obsessions and , in particular , the one that was most toxic for me was self-loathing , because I started building a case against myself . I had this resentment against myself that I mean , it was so huge it consumed me . And I met this wise old man one time and he looked at me and I told him a little bit of my story and he he looked at me and he said until you comprehend forgiveness , you will not see the path forward . And I didn't know what he was talking about . And then he gave me this little article that he had written and it was all about forgiving Myself and forgiving others . And so I spent several months Just reading that article over and over and really focusing on how can I forgive myself for my you know mistakes , for the things that I've done . It's that case to tell my kids all the time , you know they would break something and they would get really upset and the very first question would be did you do on a purpose ? Which a couple , couple episodes I had , one of those where I dropped some food and that's the first question my wife asked me is like , did you do it on purpose ? And I was so upset I said yes , but in reality I didn't . It wasn't on purpose , and that you know . Can I give myself some of that grace .

Amjed 22:52

So when I'm in that mode of self-loathing , that's when I become angry and irritable , and I believe that any anger that I've experienced in my life is always born in self-loathing . I start hating myself and Then out of that comes it just the volcano kind of builds and then I get angry Angry at other drivers , angry at my family , angry at myself , angry at the world . I just become angry . But in reality when I'm angry at is I'm angry , I'm really angry at my own failure , and that is very toxic for me , and so I focus a lot of that energy on being humble , being present and being of service , and so that I think that wraps it up . I mean , there's probably more to be said about this and maybe in a future episode it might come to me or come back , but bottom line is , I'm drowning in a sea of me and I'm the one pressing my head into the water , I'm the one pushing my head down into the water and I'm suffocating , and I'm drowning in all of this self-obsession and I'm the one who has to let go and release my hand so I can come up for air . It's all self-inflicted .

Random message of the episode

Amjed 24:25

So with that , I'm gonna switch over to the random message of the day . Okay , my little fortune cookie bucket , mix it up , let's see if I can find a good one . It'll be funny . If it's something related to this , all right , let's see what it is .

Amjed 24:48

The one who can take advice is sometimes superior to those who give it . That's interesting that my immediate thought is that's another one of the areas that I carry some shame about is I feel like I'm the king of unsolicited advice . I'll see someone or something and I'll just start . I'm like , oh , can I share with you something ? And before they can even answer , I'm telling them something about my story and it's like , ah . And then afterwards I just feel so bad because I'm like what if they weren't even interested in that ? What if they weren't even interested in hearing all that blah , blah , blah that I just did ?

Amjed 25:36

I know one time someone that I grew up with almost like a younger brother , some family friends , and he graduated and I just started . We're at the graduation party and I'm giving him all this advice about life and job and everything and did not realize that I didn't pay attention . I think I realized , but I didn't pay attention to the fact that he had been playing basketball with some friends at this party and I think he broke his finger or sprained his hand really bad or something happened like he injured his hand really bad , and he's standing there with an ice pack on his hand the whole time . I'm going blah , blah , blah , blah , blah until finally he said I really need to go change this ice pack out . And I looked out and there's like a puddle of water on the floor where he was standing and I could tell he was in pain and the timing was just terrible terrible for me to solicit all this advice .

Amjed 26:42

So anyway , I know that's not really what the quote is talking about . It sounds like what it's talking about is that humility , just to say , okay , I hear you and that is . I'm willing to accept that and that in a lot of ways , that in and of itself , that humility is far greater than the person maybe even giving the advice . And it says sometimes so you know , because it may be that the one giving advice is a little got , a little bit of that holier than thou attitude of , oh yeah , let me tell you , because I know better than you . So in recent years , what I've really focused on is not giving advice , and I hope and pray that this podcast doesn't ever come across as advice .

Amjed 27:28

What I'm doing is just sharing . I'm sharing my story and if it resonates for someone and you find something of benefit in it , great , and if it doesn't , it's okay . I was actually just thinking about that earlier . I could see someone listening to this , especially all the God talk , and being like , well , I don't believe in God and you keep calling him he and I don't know if he's a he or a she or a they or not , nothing , and it's fine . That's fine . If my story doesn't resonate , it's okay . That's .

Amjed 28:00

All I have to share is my story . I don't have advice , I don't have guidance , because advice assumes that I know what's best for you and I'm telling you that I don't know what's best for anyone . Heck , I don't even know what's best for me most days . I mean , I'm just trying to make it and these are some things that have helped me and this is some of the journey of things that I've gone through , and that's all I'm sharing . And for the one who finds benefit in it and takes it and follows it , then you may be in far better shape than me , and I think that's what I'm getting out of this quote . So with that I will wrap it up . Thanks for letting me share and I hope you found something here , a benefit . If you did , I hope you keep coming back . Thanks , music .