Confessions of a Self-Improvement Addict

My Sisyphean quest to become more fun.

The First Confession

I am Grace Leuenberger, and I am a self-improvementholic.

The Quest Begins

It was January 2023, and I had determined my New Year’s resolution: I had decided that I would have more fun. “I just don’t feel like I’m very fun,” I confessed to my mom, sitting on my parents’ couch in one of those fraught post-holiday conversations when the spirit of the season has devolved into January melancholy. “Oh Grace,” my mom replied to my lament. Her compassion at that moment didn’t move the needle: I was Not Fun and determined that I would become More Fun.

I purchased a book with the subtitle “100 Days to Discover Fun Right Where You Are,” to my Amazon cart and began my quest. Setting out to Discover Fun Right Where I Am, I tried new recipes with unexpected ingredients and played in the snow with my dog. I watched “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar” and fell off the couch laughing. I even stayed up late (sometimes)! Yet despite reading 100 prompts about Discovering Fun, I still managed to overthink 100 different decisions, have stressful dreams that awoke me from my sleep, cringe at things I said in both recent and ancient conversations, experience tremendously unfun conflicts, and cry in public at brunch.  

“Why can’t I just be More Fun?” I cried as a trickle of tears fell into my plate of waffles. As the days went by, my plan to become More Fun, in many ways, was unsuccessful. It turns out that being determined to make something fun is a really great way to actually have no fun at all. Maybe you’ve experienced this phenomenon at an event that is designed to be fun, but felt more like a disappointment (things like prom, the games portion of a baby shower, a family vacation, modern dating culture, or your birthday).

 My plan to change my personality, my limitedness, my insecurities — me — has failed spectacularly. Over, and over, and over again.

The Quest Begins…Again

This February (2024), I sat at my parents’ kitchen table and asked them, “Was I a happy child? Like, did I have fun?” They sort of laughed and told me, yes, I was a happy child who had fun.

And then I cried.

At that point in the year, it felt like I was right back where I was over a year ago. In many ways, my life felt like perpetual Groundhog Day—over and over I would wake up, drink my coffee, let my dog out, and begin work at my desk in the spare bedroom of my apartment. Most days, I felt considerably unhappy and undoubtedly unfun. I was up against some challenging changes in my personal life, including a body that was literally broken and relationships that were trending that way, too.

Those were hard months.

But it was those hard months when so many things seemed broken that my healing began. It began because I finally reckoned with the unrelenting, repetitive pressure I put on myself to be the person I thought others would think is fun or smart or insert-any-adjective-here. I finally could confess that it was exhausting to try to live a life of self-justification; it was untenable to adjust my time and attention only to things I believed would help me acquire the esteem of others and pacify my fear that others have only been pretending to like me.

My Sisyphean quest to become a better version of myself had to end.

Quitting the Quest

In Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, one of the main characters, Francis Whitman, first appears with a bandage wrapped around his head and nose. He never gives his brothers an answer as to why he has it until the end of the film, but at one point, in the company of his brothers, he takes the bandage off. As the men look over the bruised and swollen face, Francis remarks, “I guess I’ve still got some more healing to do.”

Earlier in the film, before Francis takes off his bandages, his brothers Jack and Peter (played by Jason Schwartzman and Adrien Brody) have a conversation about what’s happening to their brother. “What do you think he looks like under all that tape and everything?” says Jack. “Well, I don’t know about his face, but I think his brain might be pretty traumatized,” Peter replies.

I might not have bandages on my face like Francis Whitman, but underneath, I often feel like my brain suffers from a chronic case of spiritual amnesia. Remembering that Jesus actually cares about my hurts and hopes is not a thought that is at the forefront of my mind. I have a hard time believing that Jesus actually still loves party poopers who cry over their waffles. I require aggressively-regular reminders that life’s purpose is not progress, or being fun, or never getting bored or being thought of as boring. I need monthly, weekly, daily, and hourly reminders that Jesus really meant it when he said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” 

The reality is, no matter who you are, there’s always still more healing to do, whether that be from relational hurt, unmet hopes, insecurities, or fears for the future. I have grown so weary of my Sisyphean quest of trying to be good, of trying to be fun, of trying to fix myself. But this is not bad news. In fact, it is good news. Because now, when I look in the mirror, I most certainly see my wounds, but I see something else, too. Standing beside me, I see a witness to my wounds: a helper and a healer.

The Final Confession

A final confession: for years, I refused to watch The Chosen because I thought it seemed cheesy and decidedly uncool. But another confession: I started watching it this winter and I think it’s what started to heal my wounds. In one of the episodes of season 1, several scenes follow Jesus at the wedding in Cana—the site of his first miracle. What struck me most in the episode was how much fun Jesus was having at this wedding. He danced, he laughed, he enjoyed the meal. As I watched this depiction of Christ, I once again cried. But this time, my cry was not one of lament or sadness—it was one of relief.

Much of the time, I forget that Jesus is and was fun. But the other thing that The Chosen depicts so well (which I also forget) is that not all of Jesus’s disciples are overtly fun people. Some of them are serious, and some of them are quirky. Others are absentminded, aggressive, brave, or brash. No two are the same. And yet all of them are invited to join Jesus at the wedding feast. As a follower of Jesus, I find a great deal of comfort in knowing I am invited to the wedding feast, too. And as I sit beside my savior, I can see that he has the capacity for sorrow and celebration, for silence and shouts of jubilee. He is not always happy, nor is he always sad. Jesus will sit with us in our sadness and dance with us in our joy.

To follow Jesus is to understand and experience that he is more than a myth and he defeats the myths we chose to believe as truth. So whatever our Sisyphean quest of self-justification may be, Jesus comes along and reminds us that the curse was broken—he already rolled the stone away.