I’m starting to believe, that low self-esteem sometimes is actually a coping strategy that some have enacted, in order to safeguard themselves from experiencing failure.
I’m not saying having low self-esteem is a malicious choice, I’m only saying that often it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that we too willingly adhere to. We accept that we are less, and accept that we “couldn’t” accomplish something, so we don’t chase it. What’s the point if we could fail? Who wants that?
A Dream…
I was supposed to come write the other day. I’d had a dream where I wasn’t me, where some of the stress of not being enough, was stripped away, and I was free to just live a life where I was doing things the way I wanted and I was comfortable enough in that. To know that I was doing my best, and that even when things weren’t going to plan, it was all ok, and I was able to deal with it.
It allowed me to wake up feeling a little better, and I was so thankful for that.
Since
Finding Safety…
I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. I have identified that for me, finding safety has been at the core of what I’d always needed.
Growing up, I didn’t find safety in that we would be taken care of, nor in that we as ourselves held actual value.
I think because of this, my whole life has been centered around finding some sort of safety. This began in me looking for ways to improve my situation. To improve my value, and to improve my ability to take care of me and my own family. It led to me becoming worried quite when the things I’d planned, didn’t come to fruition.
Maybe its the time of year, and the tendency for reflection, but I encountered a thought today that shifted my view a little.
All the planning in the world, creating all the contingency plans, while it felt like the way to go, the reality is that in the most dire situation, when a meteor hits and disrupts every system we’ve ever known. All the safeguards (funds, assets, connections we’ve built) may not be available to us anymore. Things and ideas spawned in the way things are now, can easily become worthless in another scenario where everything becomes altered.
If things were drastically altered, and people are hunting your pets for food, how you are forced to deal with things would change, and would be something you wouldn’t be prepared for, nor be able to fully plan for.
I guess what I’m saying is that I think we look for safety in the wrong places. What really makes us safe, is our own flexibility and adaptability in a given situation. WE are our only reliable safety net.
Our own resilience, and ability to contend with new challenges presented in new formats is where our safety is found.
Yearly Reflections vs Resolutions..
Its that time of year again, when people start announcing their plans for the new year. How things will be different, how they will improve themselves. Hoping that this will be the year that they actually accomplish what they said they would in that 365 day time period.
It occurs to me that we often go about things asking the wrong questions. Maybe we should never actually start with a statement so bold as predicting what we will do differently. Maybe the process should always begin instead with gratitude and reflection over the past year, and the lessons learned within. Celebrating what we learned vs what we think should be our goal.
This 2023 has been a tough one if I’m honest. Loss of a really good friend, family members misbehaving, learning to not ignore myself. But from those things I’ve learned the following .
#1 This life is too short.
There is an end, and it will come without your permission or readiness. So many of our struggles with worrying about things we can’t control only serve to push back our ability in accomplishing of anything meaningful. At some point it will be “too late” and we should be more purposeful in figuring out what we should, and shouldn’t spend our limited time worrying about.
#2 Determining boundaries for yourself is required.
Regardless of how traumatized this world has left you, discovering yourself requires you figuring out your boundaries are. Boundaries really have little to do with others and so much more to do with your own behavior management. Your own self-regulation. Its not about what you can force on someone or how you can punish them for not aligning to you. Its about discovering your actual values, and deciding what you need in the given situation. Not to hide, but to be at peace with yourself.
One boundary that I’ve set this year, is to change my behavior as a fixer. To had the realization that it isn’t always loving to deny someone experiences in this life, and in turn, the lessons they could learn from them. It was something I was doing with good intentions and out of love, but people didn’t learn, and I ended up incurring worry and wounds trying to coerce peace between people over issues that weren’t even mine. I got out of the business of relaying messages between people, or trying to fix other’s relationships with interfering. I found that people were often abusing my desire to be helpful, and would become reliant on me to be an intermediary. Boundary set. I don’t pass along messages. Everyone’s relationships are their own responsibility. How they communicate to each other, their responsibility.
Another boundary is that I no longer feel obligated to give my opinion, or even a response if I feel like what was said was said only to provoke, or force some kind of response from me. If history serves that an individual uses passive aggressive remarks to lure me into debating or justifying things to them. I’m not here for a fight, and I’ve decided I get to choose about what arguments I participate in. I won’t do the witty banter back and forth, I just won’t respond at all.
I’ve decided that only those willing to explore topics without taking offense are worth exploring thoughtful with. If they can’t and they just want to argue, I don’t feel obligated here, and sadly there have been a few even loved ones this past year that I used to trust, that have moved into this category. Unfortunate, but for the best, and honestly they’ll never even realize, because I won’t make a point of making it known.
I am fully capable of disagreeing, still being respectful, and not having to make a big deal out of things.
These are the main two lessons learned from 2023.
Lost sight…
We are meant to learn from our experiences, not be defined by them, nor to use them as excuses to explain away and justify the limits we place on ourselves. I constantly see things claiming to be “self-love” or “self-care” or “personal truth” that are in earnest attitudes that are taken overboard.
Moderation is so difficult for people to manage. Comfort is as enticing, as it is sneakily dangerous. We take on attitudes and practices that weaken us, make us less resilient, less able to grow and move on, and no one chooses this for us, we choose for ourselves. At some point, most things that happen to us, are of our own making. Blaming others as well as requiring others to affirm us, is actually us choosing not to be true to ourselves.
Resilience Lost
I think I’ve finally found some of the words to articulate what I’m feeling about the current state of interactions with other people. I think that my issue is that I value being genuine, being real about what is actual reality. I want to be honest, and I hate that everyone seems to want society in general to outright lie in the name of tolerance.
I’d learned a long time ago, there is comfort, and then there is truth, and they very often don’t inhabit the same space.
I feel like we’re living in a world of narcissism, and are constantly being gaslight about what is reality in our physical realm. We’re asked to lie in order to affirm egos of those preaching tolerance, when the honest truth is, if they were the least bit “tolerant” as they claim, they could figure out how to be true and love themselves as they are and how they are. What used to be a part of personal growth, and finding a level of resilience in your own being, has become a race to require others to provide your value in convincing others to placate you. It feels like what society wants from each other is so disrespectful of all. Disrespectful of themselves, in the lies they tell themselves, and disrespectful of those around them that they seem to want to shoot at their feet and make them dance.
If they were at all being true to themselves, then they would realize the opposing nature of “expressing their uniqueness”, by subscribing to over generalized labels and stereotypes as if they matter, and then stripping away any meaning from anything until everything is such a vague notion. One where you aren’t allowed your own impressions anymore. You are required to affirm the gaslighting presented you.
Like the abused spouse who is told a story, even though they know better and witnessed the truth themselves, but is forced to lie to uphold their partner’s fairytale.
To each their own, but what is inviolate for me, is that I don’t go back to where I’m required to devalue myself, and to lie about things that I can plainly see. I don’t want to, and I’d lived too long, growing up in too similar of situation that I’d escaped in adulthood, only for the world to take on those same practices I’d gotten away from. I’ve worked too hard to find what has helped me survive through. To find the value of the truth, to accept that as I am, the way I am, without requiring that the world align with me. Without my requiring anyone to address me in any certain manner. To have the resilience to not have to waste my time and energy being offended. To not need a fairytale to be able to stomach looking myself in the eye.
The real issue..
Its frustrating that we can’t be truthful. That we spend so much time seeking out ways to label ourselves in the hopes that others will understand us.
Its all a fools errand. The reason people don’t understand, isn’t because of the words we use, or our feeble attempts to make everything be so vague that everything begins to mean absolutely nothing.
The reason why others don’t “understand” us, is because we don’t take the time to even connect with ourselves. We don’t even know our own values or actual desires half the time. So influenced are we by fleeting thoughts and emotions, that we’ve blindly accepted as being authentic simply because they were present, without at all validating them even to ourselves. We instead subscribe to stereotypes that we claim to not believe in, all the while using those same stereotypes as methods to explain away our personal likes and dislikes.
Never valuing them for what they are, simply our likes as a unique individual. Instead we have to find some way to make it be far more complex than that believing complexity yields importance or truth. We employ plastic and trendy attitudes and point at them as if they are at all solid foundations from which we can build upon, all the while actually continuing to run away, avoiding ourselves.
The frustrating part, is that as hard as you try, you can’t have it both ways. You aren’t being truthful if the reason why you don’t feel good about yourself, is claimed to be because of others, when honestly its your own requirements and your own expectations that are causing you to hate yourself.
Our Ego’s so fragile, and willing to play the victim to the other’s beliefs, because that is far easier to blame things on. When in truth, that if you at all knew yourself and your own values, you’d realize that nothing external is required. It would no longer matter, nor be required of others to exhibit specific behavior in order for you to maintain your ability to manage.
This is what’s wrong. This is the trauma we are cosigning to. To be so reliant on others fleeting opinions, that we need to argue, or “prove” our superiority to others, so that we give ourselves some sort of evidence of our own value.
The hard truth is:
You do not need to minimize others to prove your value.
If you require others attitudes and behavior to regulate your own personal emotional well being, then you need to work first on yourself, instead of focusing on changing those around you.
Resilience and decency when used together, is what inspires people the most. Falling apart and retaliating is the typical response of those who do not understand themselves or the world.
So often other’s need to see the example before they would ever decide to follow suit. Call upon yourself to exhibit calm decency in your own behavior first, before you ever expect it out of others. Be the model of what you believe to be right, without tripping over even small bouts of taking revenge over what you view as another’s wrong. In the end, who you choose to be, and the values you hold, are your own responsibility.
It is devaluing of yourself, to rely on expectations of others to keep you in a solid state.
Why we dance..
I would rather that my presence brought about my friends own desire to dance out of joy and ease, than that my presence forces my friend to dance about out of fear and discomfort.
It is one thing to offer support to someone who is working through something. Its another thing to force someone to “support” you through constant appeasement and affirming of their current views. The latter describes too many people these days.
Be cautious that the things you “require” from people isn’t actually you forcing a one sided relationship on them, forcing them to not be able to be honest, or have their own differing views around you, just because it could hurt your feelings.
It crosses the line of respect, when you require yes men, rather than a real connection with someone and their differences.
To make someone have to work to be around you, rather than just allowing them to enjoy being with you as you are beyond the nonsense and you making them jump through hoops to pretend that superficial things matter all because your ego is in your drivers seat, is honestly you requiring submissive behavior, and is in earnest disrespectful.
You know when….
You know when you go to counseling, and the therapist explains how you had done things a certain way in the past because it was how you coped, and how it made sense and actually worked for you at the time?
Then explains further how sometimes those practices become maladaptive once time has gone by, and you are no longer living in the same situation that you had created that coping strategy for.
Affirming how difficult it is for us to want to change something that “had worked” in the past, but that it would actually be healthy to do so, and to live in a way that is conducive to how things are now?…..
Yeah… America needs a good therapist.
Ask yourself…
Is it true?
Can I do something about it?
Can I accept it and do something despite its presence?
Realize that:
If you are able to lament about the past, or have anxiety about the future, it is evidence enough that your actual here and now is fine. It means that there is no tiger about to eat you, because if there was, you wouldn’t have time to think about either the past or the future.
Sincerely, Serina 