Thursday, March 13, 2014

We Are Exactly Who We Tell Ourselves We Are


When we tell ourselves we are not good enough we are instantly right. We have bought into what we perceive others are saying, with their words or actions. Our perceptions of their renderings of us put us back on our heels. The emotions we feel push us down. Our self-judgments knock us out, cold.

What we consistently tell ourselves ends up being all that matters in this life. Action is routinely tied to perpetual thought. As Rust Cohle of True Detective concludes with point blank certainty, in terms of the human race: “Look, as sentient meat, however illusory our identities are, we craft those identities by making value judgments. Everybody judges all the time. Now, you got a problem with that, you’re living wrong.” I am with myself every single day, 24/7. So are you. I am solely at the mercy of myself. As are you. As we sidle and straddle, filter through and flock to, different energies, good and bad, the tendency is to self-judge. There is the energy of the environment in the absence of humanity. There is also the environment we humans co-create and inhabit, arguably dominate. Nowadays, this environment is nearly everywhere. Nowhere is humanity unheard. Though, there are some that may argue, this isn’t humanity. Either way, we are all affected by it. Every type of people is a person. Even the grotesquely inhumane are in some truthful way representative of all latent humanity. This is perhaps the best evidence of a greater dimension; otherwise we would all fall prey to absolute evil. Nonetheless, we are good and we are bad. It is who we choose to listen to that determines how we choose to act. The one dimensional existence is full of lots of neat, fancy thoughts and notions, standing atop tall buildings looking down on anyone that is not them. The voices of these people are primarily full of shit. We all have been on top of these tall buildings before. We have all been below the ground, unfit for breathing the same air as our fellow humans. We have all been full of shit. Even when we all walk side by side, our sense of self is rarely on par with what others think of us. In short, we are thinking way too much about what others think of us. What will they say? What will they think and not say? What would I say or think if the roles were reversed? This last question is telling. Asking is in short, an admission of guilt.

We all judge. I won’t deny that I do. I will state matter-of-factly, if and when I judge, it is rarely malicious. None of our thoughts are ever absolute. There is always redemption. I observe and notice and sometimes infer. An inference about a person is a judgment. We take sensory information and perceive that something about that person, based on what we have seen through firsthand experiences and interactions with that person is true. It is how the human mind functions. When we gather new information, we formulate new thoughts. A judgment is not a conclusion. Conclusions are final and high-stakes, condemning and damning. Most judgments we make are forgotten by the end of the day. Yet there is a tendency to hold onto self-judgments, as if they were written in stone. I am lazy. Tell ourselves enough and we will sink into the sofa every single day and sleepwalk through tomorrow. I am not smart enough. Tell ourselves enough and we will settle for something less than what we truly want. I have bad genetics, I will always be overweight. Tell ourselves enough and we will enlarge and atrophy, at the same time. Sigh. I can’t show my true self because no one wants to see me for who I really am. This is never the case! The world would be such a much better place if we were all less afraid to be ourselves. We all need to just go for it, hand in hand.

I can forgive someone one thousand times over if they have good intentions and a good heart. However, I have trouble forgiving myself. I have trouble accepting failure as something less than final judgment. I have concluded, the following: We aren’t really living if we aren’t failing, in the conventional sense. Life is paradoxical: it is static movement. There are so many factors, nuances, and change in a fraction of time that our unique, individual experience is ultimately impossible to track. The graphing model is “anything goes,” within a range of personal response that has much to do with individual personality traits and tendencies established in our earliest years. Though we may very well hold onto the same mannerisms and quirky behavior long ago structured, that makeup a part of who we are, we can do something to redirect the energy encircling our insecurities, stifling the negative thought patterns that are merely illusionary intertwinement. Dead in their tracks, these negative thought cycles no longer exist. Our insecurities are now just insecurities. In the absence of fear, these insecurities no longer hold any real power over us. They no longer reverberate throughout the spaces of our mind. They no longer control our actions. We are free. To live fully.

We become graffiti, or caution tape, a faint outline of our true being when we habitually ignore that whisper from a higher plane that tell us: Get up. You are good enough. Failure is necessary. Judgments are mortal.  Fears are formed out of a singular primary fear that we are somehow imperfect. And yet, we fail to see that imperfect is an imperfect word, as are all words, and therefore each and every label we ascribe to ourselves or place on others. After all, they are all human constructs. We are all perfect, our true selves are all perfectly spherical. This is our destiny, and to question is normal. We need to be careful though, not to ascertain; for it is in vain. There is a higher plane a piece of each of us is a part of. But where do we come from?

1 comment:

  1. Love this & it really makes you think. Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete