What do you most admire about yourself?

I get it. If you’re flawless like I am, it’s hard to narrow it down. 

But I’ll go first if that helps.

However, before I humbly brag on myself for, oh, say, a thousand words or so, I must tell you why I’m writing.

About a week and a half ago, over a cup of iced coffee with one of my good friends, I was asked what I most admire about myself. 

We were about an hour and fifteen minutes into an enjoyable conversation covering topics like our jobs, our childhoods, our college years, and our life philosophies until he asked me: what do you most admire about yourself?

 It threw me off. 

Any momentum our conversation had was lost the moment the question came out of his mouth.

I couldn’t believe how difficult it was to answer.

Even more surprising when I consider the seriously pathetic amount of time thinking about myself. It’s actually quite shameful when I think about how much time I spend thinking about myself but for the sake of this post, it’s an admission I must make.

In that moment, it occurred to me that I spend most of my waking hours thinking about myself, who I am, who I want to be, how I’m going to get there, how I fit into the world, and what I’ll leave behind when I’m gone. Heavy shit for a twenty-nine year old but I guess that’s what you get when you spend your entire life working with and around people living out their last days in a nursing home. 

And please believe me, if you’re grossed out by the admission that I think about myself more than anything else in the world, I can assure you it makes me just as sick.

If I could press a button that would allow me to stop thinking about myself for a while, I’d press it faster than an unsupervised toddler holding a television remote. 

Yes. I find short-lived reprieve in healthy activities like reading, writing, running, and cleaning my apartment but nothing seems to keep my self-flagellation at bay for as long as I’d like it to.

Sometimes I think these thoughts would be more enjoyable  to have if they were positive but that’s rarely the reality.

I can spend hours or even days ruminating about how I’m not the person I ought to be, want to be, could be, and I can always come up with a list of reasons that justify such thoughts.

So when my friend asked me this question, it felt a lot like the way I imagine the way a car feels when someone accidentally drops a wrench in the engine. Everything in my brain jammed.

And to be clear, I don’t actually think I’m as bad a person as my internal dialogue would often have me believe. I guess I’ve found it an easier life to do all of the criticism of myself before anyone else can do it to me so I know what’s coming, when it’s coming, and where it’s coming from.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. There’s nothing anyone can tell me about myself that I haven’t already told myself a million times a million different ways. 

And the more I thought about it that way, the more clear it became to me. I do admire who I am and the life I’m living. With some more consideration, it became clear that my favorite part of myself is my ability to recognize my shortcomings and do something about them. That’s really what I’m trying to do when I tell myself about all of the things I’d like to change about myself.

I’ve made profound changes in my life a few times and I proudly admit it’s what I most admire about myself.

For example, I was overweight for the majority of my childhood and teenage years.

I hated being overweight. 

I hated being the ‘fat kid’ in class. I hated taking my shirt off at the pool (sometimes I’d wear my t-shirt in the pool which only made me more self-conscious). I hated that I couldn’t buy the clothes I wanted to buy (I developed a love for sneakers because of all the clothes I couldn’t fit into as a kid). I hated that my mom would ask me what I was getting from the fridge every time I opened the door even though I knew she was doing it because she cared about me. I hated all of it yet I had no idea how to fix it.

My parents were mindful of the food I was eating. 

They’d offer to go on walks with me but I wasn’t interested. 

They even got me a personal trainer when I was in eighth grade.

None of it helped.

There wasn’t a day in my childhood where I didn’t think about my weight and how I so hated being the ‘fat kid’. 

Growing up, I was so sure that I would spend my life overweight. Losing weight seemed impossible and I saw so many people who only gained more weight as they got older. 

‘Fat kid’ was my identity throughout my childhood and teenage years and it’s the identity I assumed I’d have for the rest of my life.

I was a senior in high school and I was still the same overweight kid I’d been since I was in elementary school. 

I got closer to graduation and I’m still not sure what exactly clicked. I decided to make one last attempt at losing weight. I guess I finally came to grips that it was my fault that I was overweight, even if I never fully understood how it happened, and that it was my responsibility to fix it. 

Once I accepted that fact, it became clear what I had to do. 

And once that became clear, I did it. Just like that, I changed my diet and focused on exercising like it was the only thing in my life that mattered. In ways, it was. 

I realized I had the power to change myself for the better. 

I was determined to walk onto my college campus as a freshman as a different person. I knew it was my chance to leave my old identity as the ‘fat kid’ behind and become the person I really wanted to be. 

And so I did it. 

And at twenty-nine years old, I haven't’ looked back. 

Even though I havent’ felt the way I felt when I was overweight, those memories still loom large.

And so, I guess, my best answer to the question my friend asked me is that. My best answer is that I’m most proud of my ability to change who I am in pursuit of a better me.

I’ve done this a few different times and I’ve found each time I do it, I get that much closer to the person I know I can be.

With that, I'll ask again:

What do you most admire about yourself?

Chances are, its a part of you who overcame  a situation that seemed impossible until it wasn’t.