So, for a long time now, I've held the suspicion that everyone has a crutch. Or rather, I've longed believed "modern life" negatively influences people to enlist a crutch to appease their life's immediate challenges. By 'Crutch' I mean to say an activity or practice in one's life that usually subtracts and never adds. This could be as extreme as an addiction but also as harmless as a non-constructive habit. It's usually a thing that you do that you know it's not good for you but you do it all the same.
For me, I directly used my 'Crutch' as emotional self-medication. I leaned on it to forgive myself when things didn't go my way or for not getting my world and feeling like an idiot. Supposedly, my crutch is "helping" me from tipping into total self-destruction when in fact it's just emotionally detaining me.
Because I understand kicking my crutch is the first step towards regaining my natural emotional balance, I often self-sabotage in the name of pointlessness & self-defeating counter-arguments.What's the point of 'getting better' if I'm never going to fully understand my world (both within & without) before I actively choose to live in it? What's the point if Life is always going to be challenging in some way?
In other words, my fear campaigned: since choosing to live life without fully understanding it is equivalent to being okay with my mortality, why pretend to be okay? You're dying but it's okay, here I'll help you- take this crutch. Doesn't it feel good?
However, recently, two thoughts occurred to me as one:
You gotta be who you are in this world!
Who you are is always changing with the changing world!
I realized what the existence of 'Crutch' was a foil of to begin with - Growth! While Challenges threaten to throw me, if I can't sustain my center of gravity then I must grow in some way to do so. It's all about abandoning crutches, finding balance, and ultimately the equilibrium of the heart.