I have experienced living half-assed for quite a while now. Without thinking very far back, I can ballpark it to about age 10 -- 13.5 years now. When my parents divorced -- and more aptly, when I internalized that my father rejected me -- I started to live life on autopilot. I was smart enough so I didn't even have to go to half my classes to get a decent grade. This continued on into college. I actually got approached by a professor who was bewildered and confused about what action to take; his syllabus indicated attendance as an integral piece of the successful grade-getting puzzle, but I was coming in just for the test and acing the class...he didn't know how he should grade me (what can I tell you, I am always pushing up against people's beliefs about what reality "should be" and what reality actually is lol).
For the longest time I blamed my inability to perform to my best on a number of things, including but not limited to: TIME (I mastered the ability to align my life with time and timeliness and then completely rejected it), ATTENTION (for MUCH too long I have "needed" attention and praise to "motivate" me -- by "motivate" I simply mean "keep me going until the next experience in which I was then starved for attention"), PERFECTION (I always needed to be beautiful, intelligent, right, inspiring, happy, real, successful, good enough...but not just that -- the MOST beautiful, intelligent, right, inspiring, happy, real, successful and good enough that was possible. No one could ever be better than me. If so, I was a failure and there was hell to pay within myself, and then I would manifest that without), CLARITY, OTHERS' OPINIONS/ACCEPTANCE (FYI: this, coupled with perfection, was my largest and most resilient downfall).
I'm typing this to make it even more real for myself. And I'm hoping that you will learn from it and that you will take it into your life and begin applying it if it rings true for you. But mostly, I'm writing it for me.
I've lived too long being half an ass. I'd rather just not be an ass at all (is that perfection coming in, though?) --> Oh, that points out a great aspect of my half-assed-ness that I forgot to mention. I would always worry myself to death, criticizing myself to death, and picturing the worst that could happen to keep myself from inaction. Also, I always focused my energy and my vitality even on the benefit and the "helping" of others and I never focused enough on me. Here is a tricky part for me to describe. There's the whole "live for yourself, 'cause it's not (the bad version of) selfish" conversation that I'm not quite sure really sinks in to anyone's brain...and I know it didn't for me...but that's not even quite what I mean when I say I never lived for myself...I THOUGHT I was living for me. That's where the shit was hitting the fan. I fooled myself into believing that I cared so much about a person or an organization that I would drop anything to help them or make ridiculous sacrifices to my personal integrity to make sure they felt okay. I actually believed THAT was my nature. The truth I see now is that everyone is capable of making their own choices and living in their own beliefs and realities and I hinder their growth and their future power by living half-assed and supporting them in THEIR half-assed-ness, if they were even that close...
When my dad left, I felt punished for not being good enough, though I had no real evidence that I WASN'T good enough. That, for some odd reason, was the first story that popped into my head in the very first moment I heard he left. I have been living that belief for over 13 years...more than half of my life...
I am finally discovering that I am good enough to be who I want to be, and I am teaching myself that, experience by experience. My life is changing dramatically as I connect with all this evidence. It really is beautiful right now, and the neophyte I am is afraid it will go away and I won't know how to regain it. But the truth is that I will know how to regain it, because I have just now learned how to gain it with no precedent. This time, if it slips, I will have a precedent to remember and to rely on for inspiration to find my way forward to where I want to live.
Good news.
