How Can We Be Less Of Ourselves?
As we grow older, we come to realise that we’ve been raised through a conditioned lens. It is not a lens that truly honours who it is we are. We tell ourselves we will get to where we want to be, someday somehow. But deep down we know a long life is far from guaranteed. Nearly everyone dies before they’re ready. The future is already here, it is merely unevenly distributed. Nevertheless, we still cling on to our hope, as though hoping is not a byproduct of hopelessness. Every so often, we find ourselves going through a scattered period in our lives. We feel like our energy is travelling a millimeter outward in a million directions. In times like this, we start to doubt ourselves. We don’t doubt the achievements and successes we’ve amassed.
We doubt if these achievements and successes are what we truly want.
At some point, we weren’t as complicit in creating the conditions we say we don’t want. We got used to that affirmation of what people recognised of us. Instead of tracking our own lens, we allowed others to determine what success and happiness looks like for us. We feel a pang of guilt, because we know experience usually embeds the assumptions that requires to be questioned in the first place. We allow our tiny bubble of people, from family to strangers, to convince us that there is a reason why we got distracted. Because it was easier. Because it was meant to be. Because it contains more money.
One thing led to the other, and we started labeling ourselves mostly of necessity. In today’s world where efficiency seems almost never efficient enough, the heartless vacuum of mainstream culture wants to quickly point a finger on what we are than who we are. Insidiously, we begin to compromise our dearest values and betray our personal principles. We prostitute our talents and passion in the service of commerce.
We become the very person our 14-year-old self scoff at.
By the opinion of our adolescent self, we are failures and traitors. To be fair, our adolescent self have not much clue as to how life operates in the real world. We have the least amount of data to base our decisions on and the vaguest impression of what implications and consequences entail. We simply get muddled up in the thicket of complications with a whole lot of panic and motherly concern. We know nothing except ourselves, and ourselves serve as a moral polestar to a better self. We had the time to procrastinate and think. We were wandering generalities, and in those brief moments, we’ve experienced heights of ecstasy. Now, we stop wondering. We immediately jump on the assumption that the trajectory we’re on is the right one, that it is alright, that it is okay to constantly experience a familiar jolt of regret and shame of a part of ourselves we’ve left behind.
It isn’t.
I believe it isn’t. I believe it is time to break our mind and open up our soul. Like a butterfly shattering a chrysalis to emerge onto a new life, we can do the same. The “normal” systems that are in place along with the social rules supposedly forced upon ourselves are simply man-made frameworks that can be torn down. We can shed these artificial constraints. We can negotiate our reality. We can be who we truly want to be, not if, but when we dare to be. Of all the times that our integrity was ill-defined, it is time to right this wrong. If your 14-year-old self could you see now, what would they think of you? What would they hope you do?
