The process of becoming yourself is not a corporate desk job, and it is not homework, and it is not an unticked box languishing on a to-do list. You do not have to treat your flaws like action items that must be systematically targeted and eliminated in order to receive a return on investment. You have no supervisor; you should not be punished when you fail. Your job is not to lock the doors and chisel at yourself like a marble statue in the darkness until you feel quantifiably worthy of the world outside. Your job, really, is to find people who love you for reasons you hardly understand, and to love them back, and to try as hard as you can to make it all easier for each other. 

...you shouldn’t be dismayed if a sadness rises up in front of you, greater than any you have ever seen before; or if a disquiet plays over your hands and over all your doings like light and cloud-shadow. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don’t know what work it is these states are performing within you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where it all comes from and where it is leading? You well know you are in a period of transition and want nothing more than to be transformed. If there is something ailing in the way you go about things, then remember that sickness is the means by which an organism rids itself of something foreign to it. All one has to do is help it to be ill, to have its whole illness and let it break out, for that is how it mends itself.

Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke

Let the dreams come, let them rush into the day, let them fill all the spaces between things without judgment. Everyone is so clever, and trying so hard. “You’re trying too hard,” I tell myself. Unobtrusively, someone inhabits a space: do they belong or do they not belong? I do not always know when to begin, when to end, or even how to look back and see where the beginnings began and the ends ended. It goes on endlessly, as they say. Sometimes an allusion ruins the thing you are making. It’s just like what I thought to myself about trying too hard. I’m that person in the story. Sometimes we fail, and the question is just what failing reveals. Like water drained from a lake or an ocean. As she reminded me, there are times when expressing grief can be illegal. Standing under the sky, pigeons wheeling overhead, something as simple as that. What does the thought “this cannot be happening” mean when we think it? When I think it?

• Sal Randolph — Can you point to anything that is not a gift?

“That’s the main thing. As long as you’re wanting to be thinner, smarter, more enlightened, less uptight, or whatever it might be, somehow you’re always going to be approaching your problem with the very same logic that created it to begin with: you’re not good enough. That’s why the habitual pattern never unwinds itself when you’re trying to improve, because you go about it in exactly the same habitual style that caused all the pain to start. There’s a life-affirming teaching in Buddhism, which is that Buddha, which means “awake,” is not someone you worship. Buddha is not someone you aspire to; Buddha is not somebody who was born more than two thousand years ago and was smarter than you’ll ever be. Buddha is our inherent nature— our buddha nature—and what that means is that if you’re going to grow up fully, the way that it happens is that you begin to connect with the intelligence that you already have. It’s not like some intelligence that’s going to be transplanted into you. If you’re going to be fully mature, you will no longer be imprisoned in the childhood feeling that you always need to protect yourself or shield yourself because things are too harsh. If you’re going to be a grown-up—which I would define as being completely at home in your world no matter how difficult the situation—it’s be- cause you will allow something that’s already in you to be nurtured. You allow it to grow, you allow it to come out, instead of all the time shielding it and protecting it and keeping it buried.”