Empty Promises

If a glass is half empty, can you fill the rest with empty promises?

It’s a three days after the New Year. She is one of many over the last few days to stand here, surveying the shelves of empty promises deceptively labeled ‘self-help books’. The aisle is pock-marked with gaps of titles destined to spend their days as shelf candy after their owner reads the first chapter. She wonders why she’s here again, eyes sweeping unseeingly across the colorful spines.

If a self-help book is an empty promise, is the book lying to you or are you lying to yourself?

She shuffles closer to read the array of titles and cocks her head sideways so she can read them without removing them. They declare cures to self-doubt, the secret to self-love, and the road to high self-esteem. Maybe she doesn’t know the right people, but she‘s never met someone who read a self-help book and promptly turned their life around. Self-help books, she’s always thought, were only lies that the unmotivated tried to sell themselves.

If you’re unwilling to look for a solution independently, is a step-by-step going give you one?

Content to judge the books by their covers, her hand trails along until one catches her eye. With a little hum of pleasure, her pointer finger stops on top of a spine with a cartoon Golden Retriever grinning at her. Tilting it off the shelf and letting it fall into her hand, she smiles at the line-up of cheerful dogs on the cover. Thick golden letters read Dogged Determination: Dynamos Get it Done!, imposed over a soft blue paw-print. She laughs at the gratuitous alliteration and agrees, at least, with the title.

If you make yourself an empty promise, can you fill it up later?

Tucking the book under her arm, she continues down the line. She devotes a portion of her mind to reading the names and uses the rest to ponder the eccentricities of self-doubt in a world where confidence is key. The inspiring biographies of people who’ve made it, only carry them onto the pedestal of people ‘not like everyone else’. Oddly enough, they rarely seem to inspire anyone. Publishing companies sell millions of self-help books and yet, there don’t seem to be millions of doggedly determined dynamos. Which begets the question:

If you’re suffering from self-doubt, will a few clever words clear it up for you?

Not in her mind. Clever words might falsify some positive feelings, but they tend to evaporate when faced with the blank page, the empty foundation, or the apparent impassiveness of a tight schedule. She’s no stranger to doubt and even less to self-help books. She remembers her first job more vividly than she wishes, the long hours on her feet serving customers who cared about their order first and the orphaned teenager they’re chewing out second. At nineteen, her second job lacked both irate customers and any sort of mental or physical stimulation. For the sake of her sanity, she didn’t keep count of the hours wasted at a desk where she achieved nothing more than a new high score on solitaire. Her third job at twenty-two was easier to swallow but left her with little in her stomach. It was a struggle to pay the rent, and other necessities were a constant balancing act

Doubt and despair were her constant companions. How could she hope to meet someone special when she was constantly hungry and exhausted? How could she dare to hope she would finally get the family she’d been dreaming about while trying to build a life she didn’t hate so deeply that the very marrow in her bones ached. The books, she found, were only empty promises.

If you haven’t achieved your dreams yet, is self-help book going to fix your life for you?

Spoiler: it won’t. It can’t. It’s words on a page from someone who’s figured out how to make things work for their unique circumstances. But here’s the hassle (and the caution of a hundred authors)–it’s different for everyone. If it were as easy as 1-2-3, the self-help aisle would consist of a dozens of copies of the same book. She learned that the hard way, spending hours staring at these books. Mostly she sat curled up in the library’s armchairs, too poor to even think of spending money she didn’t have on something so non-essential as a book.

She lost the little studio apartment she’d barely been able to afford. So she learned to live out of the little old car five years older than her and clean herself up at truck stops, camp grounds, and streams. She subsisted on scraps and library books, surviving by the longing for things she’s never experienced. In the morning she burned for a passion more invigorating than the her daily dose of complimentary coffee. At night she dreamed a life as vibrant as the eye-watering colors of her thrift shop quilt. All day long, she yearned for a family more enumerable than the scratches and dents on the car she called home.

Until one day, she found the trick. It’s a little thing, something buried so well you don’t know it exists. Or maybe something so obvious you’ve overlooked it every day of your life. That little something, that little needle, is the push, the tool you need to start sewing the quilt you’ve been failing to make for years. You have all the materials and dozen different plans, but you don’t have that one thing you need to get started. So the trick is digging through the haystack of You–your personality, your situation, your beliefs, your tendencies–for the needle you need to start sewing. The needle is a question that everyone has to answer, and everyone has to answer it differently. This is the question:

If you’re capable of achieving everything you’ve ever dreamed, what’s in your way?

“Mom!” Her son skids around the corner, a simple book on how to draw pinned to his chest.

“Be mindful of the other people here,” she scolds him but with little heat. Any parental disapproval is smothered both by his enthusiastic grin and her own ruminations.

He ducks his head a little and asks quietly, “Now can we go to the art store?”

“Of course.” She nods. “Let’s go check out that book.”

He needs no further encouragement and scoots off towards the register at a speed only minutely slower than the one he arrived with a moment before.

She replaces Dogged Determination in its proper place and smiles once more at the shelf of empty promises. Turning to follow her son, she thinks that he has something better than anything in this aisle. While the advice of others may fiddle with the specifics, the only way to help yourself is through sheer discipline and force of will. If a thousand self-help books have taught her anything it’s this:

If you’ve promised yourself you’ll do it, then can anyone besides yourself can stop you?