Words With Myself

It is human nature to avoid pain, integrated into our survival are mechanisms that protect us from dealing with pain. Unfortunately, these mechanisms can work against us as well as for us. When we bury trauma and avoid the pain of addressing it, no matter how deep we bury it, it will always find a way to come back up and manifest itself back into your life. Anger, Sadness, Depression, Numbness can all be symptoms of something that you are avoiding and you may have avoided it for so long, you don't quite remember what it even was that was hurting you. Dealing with trauma may cause short term pain, but it will result in long term peace.

If you did everything you knew you were supposed to do, every day, how would your life be different years from now? How much closer would you be to the person you want to be, the things you want to have and the things you want to do? What are the things you are avoiding? This is the kind of questions I have been thinking about lately and I have realised just how much time I have spent recently off my path, it is time to get back on it.

Lately, I have been focused on things that I need to unlearn rather than things I need to learn. In school, I picked up a lot of negative thoughts and patterns that I still repeat to this day, I learned to hide myself, to reduce my achievements and make myself small. Well, I will no longer tolerate this for myself, I release these wrong teachings and assimilate the new, I am going to burn brighter than ever and will stop at nothing to live up to my full potential. 

Sometimes it can feel like the world is against you, like the whole universe is conspiring to make you miserable. Well, I know how this feels all to well but I also recognise that it is a complete fallacy. Despite how it may feel, the problems that you are facing are just challenges you need to complete in order to level up. To get to a place where the kinds of issue you are facing don't even effect you. To motivate you to work harder, smarter and better so that you are in a position to glide over these things as trivial. We must seek adversity, charge forward at each problem and tackle them head on. This is how we grow.

For some people, myself included, we are well versed at doing things ourselves but we are terrible at asking for things. This kind of person will typically give all they can in the service of other people even to the detriment of themselves, they always go the extra mile to help or accommodate the needs of others but never allow others to help them with their needs and wants. This is the self-dependence trap, being so independent that we lose our ability to ever be dependent on anyone or anything but ourselves.

In my experience, very few people identify themselves as completely confident. If you ask someone if they are confident or not, their first response is usually what they are most insecure about instead. We have a tendency to view people as either confident or not, but the truth is, confidence is complicated. Almost everyone (if not everyone) has insecurities and things they are not confident about, whether it is their ability, looks, voice or anything else. If you self identify as not confident, instead, try to break that down into different areas and understand in which places you are least to most confident. A lack of confidence can lead to a lack of execution and missed out opportunities, missing out on that job opportunity, talking to the person of your dreams or just losing the chance to help someone in need.

Sometimes it can feel like we have hit a block, that no matter what we do we can't feel better. Sometimes this is because we focus on the areas we want to change as opposed to the areas that we have to. The more integrated you are with your trauma and the negative things in your life, the harder it is to clear them from it. We justify, protect and ignore the things that hurt us because we have grown used to the pain that they cause, we can become "comfortable" and we know that change is hard and painful. However, if we don't deal with the root cause of our issues, it will only become more ingrained and harder to remove.

My worst nightmare happened, I failed. Well, not really, but I did lose my competition at the weekend. I did, however, win something invaluable that day. I won my respect and I finally learned something that I knew was true but never truly believed. I don't have to prove myself to anyone, I don't have to be something for other people, I just have to be something for me. I am proud of myself, I am proud of what I accomplished and what I was able to do and out of every victory I have ever had, I have never been able to truly say those words. It took losing to know what winning truly is, to truly know the meaning of success and not know it just by others definition of it. I am playing my own game now, fighting my own fight, this is my life and I will not allow it to be democratised.

School and me did not go well together, the main thing I thought I learned from school was that I was incompetent. This, however, is not the case. I just didn't learn the way you are supposed to learn in school, I didn't conform to the generic "good pupil". So many people end up feeling like a failure in school when it is really school that is failing you, to make it worse, they blame you. You didn't pass the tests because you weren't good enough, you didn't try or you were a bad kid, this is what I was told and I am certainly not the only one. Education is not the enemy, knowledge and intelligence are not things to be hated or feared, you just have to learn the way that suits you best.

We often want to feel more in control of our lives but how often are we voluntarily giving up control? We can often feel like life is happen to us, that we are victims of misfortune or bad circumstances. We can make statements like "They made me...", "I have to because..." or "I can't because I don't have...". Statements such as these are powerless, they make it seem like we are not in control of our own lives. We can change the narrative though, we can put ourselves in the position of power, take control and take responsibility. We can stop playing the blame game.