"Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves." -Henry David Thoreau.
I think the subject of knowing who you truly are is a sensitive one. There have been many debates about what this means. Knowing yourself doesn't necessarily mean that you wake up and look in the mirror and say to yourself "perfection is staring at me. I'm the most awesome person in the whole wide world!" You can repeat this every day, and on some days, it will not be true. Some days, a person doesn't feel very awesome. Some days are not perfect. Some days, a lot of work has to be done to understand why a person feels less than.
I learned this when I went through a devastating experience in 2007. What was interesting about this time is I was 3 years into being sober. After I quit drinking and smoking, I seriously thought I had conquered the world. No one could tell me that I was doing anything wrong. Because I felt strong enough to stay sober, I felt that there was nothing I could do that would be worse than what I did while I was drinking.
I was wrong. I mean...I was really wrong.
Quitting for me was epiphanic, so the act of quitting was not that difficult for me. When I was in the hospital and I was presented with the realities of what I was doing, it was as if alcohol just ran out of me and never came back. I have moments where I am triggered, but I know for a certainty that I will never, ever drink again. What I didn't realize at the time was I had only dealt with a symptom. I had not yet dealt with the problem.
Me. My thoughts. My actions. Holding myself accountable.
"Well, how do I do that?" I thought to myself. I was taught that I just had to repeat positive stuff every single day and somehow the positive stuff would just appear automatically. If something negative was going on, stay out of it. If something was happening to someone else that didn't involve you, don't get involved.
What happened in 2007 could lead me on a path of blame. I could have chosen to use my past and present it as an excuse for why I did what I did, or I could do something differently.
I could understand that my choice was really about me and had nothing to do with my past or my current circumstance. I could choose to understand that the moments that I chose could have gone a different way if I had chosen differently. My past and my present had nothing to do with what I chose. That was all me.
That is when I looked myself in the mirror and said "I am not perfect, and right now, I am not awesome at all." I had to cry a lot. I had to understand that facing those realities was the only way I could get the help I needed. Counseling wasn't going to get rid of my past. Counseling was not going to fix my present. I had complete control over holding myself accountable and fixing my current circumstances so that I could live a more meaningful life. I also had to understand that holding myself accountable meant that I couldn't just stand back and not get involved when I saw things happening that were wrong. I had to hold others accountable as well.
My reasons for writing this are to let people know that knowing yourself means that you know and accept it all; the good, the bad, and the ugly. It means that on some days, you have to ask yourself questions about why you want to make certain choices, or why you made certain choices. The answers to those questions are not always going to be pretty. The choices that you are going to have to make or not make are not always going to be pretty. But the reality is that allowing yourself to be in the storm is what allows you the opportunity to protect yourself and others in it. But you have to know that the storm isn't pleasant and that sometimes, you have to walk in it alone. However, when the storm ends, those people who knew you before you walked in, will be there to help you when you get out.
The secret to knowing who others are is by knowing who you are. You can see through what people want from you, even if they're saying something completely different than what you know is happening. When you know what you truly want from yourself; when you know your motives for what you do; when you know who you truly are inside...truly...EVERYTHING...all that you've done and are doing and the why behind it all...that is when your decisions become fully informed, and when your esteem of self becomes more grounded.
This is an extremely painful process sometimes. Certain decisions you have to know are wrong decisions and that is painful to admit and comes with a lot of tears - but the process of healing is so much more present when we deal with this truth. Certain decisions you have to know are the right decisions and sometimes, even those choices can be painful...really painful...but knowing who you are and why you made those choices again gives you the ability to see who is truly in your corner, and most importantly, who is dealing with the truth inside themselves.
One of the most amazing things I have read about knowing yourself came from Mindy Kaling. Mindy is a writer and producer and extremely talented. She wrote something about the thoughts of others when it comes to knowing yourself:
“People’s reaction to me is sometimes "Uch, I just don’t like her. I hate how she thinks she is so great.” But it’s not that I think I’m so great. I just don’t hate myself. I do idiotic things all the time and I say crazy stuff I regret, but I don’t let everything traumatize me. And the scary thing I have noticed is that some people really feel uncomfortable around women who don’t hate themselves. So that’s why you need to be a little bit brave.”
I don't think I'm great. I don't think I'm spectacular or one of a kind. I don't think that I can do no wrong, and every day is not full of sunshine and rainbows. I just got to a place of not hating who I am and I know ALL that comes with me. People become very afraid of that...not because they are afraid of what you're going to do, but because they become afraid of what they're not going to do.
Most of the time that involves not accepting who they are. Not holding themselves accountable. People don't want to be held to a higher standard of self. Instead of celebrating your daily process of that growth, they will try to destroy it not to prevent you from staying in that place, but to prevent themselves from having to get there. That is really sad.
What I know though is that the true secret to knowing the outside world is by truly knowing your inside world. If you conquer that, there is nothing in the world that you cannot do.
I wish everyone the chance to know you. If this blog gives you that gift, THAT is the best mother's day present I could on any day.
Komentarze