“The Way Things Are”
My personal freedom was found when I discovered that things aren’t the way they are.
I had been living my life based on a lie. A lie that fueled an endless list of attempts to compensate for what I believed was my fundamental inadequacy.
My basic paradigm, the assumption upon which I had unwittingly based my entire adult life was, put bluntly, horse-shit.
You see, at the core, I believed that I was “bad”. Therefore, my entire life was built around compensating for my inherent “badness”.
People pleasing, perfectionism, conflict avoidance, crippling fear of failure, all served to build an image of stability and “goodness”, that I could present to other people. That way they’d never find out how bad I actually was.
I think most people have a similar belief, usually formed in childhood.
We have an experience, usually with one or both parents, where we notice for the first time that love is at least partially conditional.
We go from having only experienced unconditional love and care, to experiencing rejection for the first time in our very short lives.
Perhaps we get yelled at for the first time, or perhaps our parent or parents don’t give us the same amount of attention they usually do.
We think, “what did I do wrong?”
“Why doesn’t mom/dad love me like they used to?”
As little kids (and frequently as adults) we often lack the ability to see things clearly.
We don’t see that mom had a rough day at work, and she was exhausted and didn’t have the energy to spend time with you like she usually did before.
A kid just understands “Mom didn’t give me attention” and has to try to explain to themselves WHY.
I and many, many other people came to a simple logical conclusion. I must be bad! I must’ve done something wrong.
This represents a huge problem for a child who depends on their parents not just for love, but also for food and shelter. If you’re not loveable, you’re going to be abandoned, which means you will quite literally die. (Perhaps this explains why for many people the fear of abandonment is similar to the fear of death)
And in little Andrew’s mind (and the minds of millions of other children) a simple solution presented itself.
What if I never do anything wrong, ever again? What if I only ever make people happy? What if I’m always right?
Then they’ll have to love me, and I’ll feel whole again.
…
I spent about 26 years of my life living out that pattern. Dealing with maintaining an external image of perfection. Everybody always believed I would accomplish great things. Everybody was always saying how great I was.
It didn’t matter. I knew it was all an act. Because I knew I was bad. That’s just how it was!
Until one day I saw the truth.
The way it was…wasn’t.
I saw the entirety of my years of fear and anxiety, my self-loathing and my occasional desire to erase myself revealed for what they were.
Bullshit. Meaningless. A child’s misunderstanding extrapolated across two and a half decades of life experience.
Everything I had every tried to do to "improve” was pointless, because I was trying to improve something that wasn’t.
The belief that I wasn’t good enough motivated action to change, but it also motivated self-sabotage!
My crippling fear of failure led me to give up on college and to give up on pursuing my dreams. I thought there was no chance “someone like me” could succeed. All the while I needed to maintain an exterior image of being “right” to prove I was good. So I always had a convenient line of excuses ready to justify my place in life.
All born out of a belief that was WRONG.
These fundamental flaws - our belief that there’s something wrong about us. We’re just bad, or unworthy, or unlovable.
These things lie at the bottom of the chain of "why”.
And they’re simply not true.
There’s nothing wrong with you, and you don’t need to be fixed.
90% of the problems I’ve faced in my life (probably 99 or 100% if I’m being honest) have been born SOLELY out of my desire to avoid being revealed as a fraud, unlovable and unworthy. Insecurity, fear, doubt, jealousy, anxiety, and guilt all spout endlessly from the belief that we’re flawed. That we’re somehow less.
We spend our lives CHASING what we think will fix us. But it never works, because the energy that motivates the chasing is the energy that sabotages the effort.
As Jiddu Krishnamurti said, “It is only that which is that can be transformed”. In the original context he spoke in terms of knowing where you are in life. Where you actually are.
When we are acting out of this fundamental inadequacy, we sabotage our own efforts. We attempt to transform that which is NOT. And thus, cannot ever be successful.
But the good news is that you don’t need to transform the belief that you’re unworthy, or flawed.
You simply need to see the truth and let go
“It is only that which is that can be transformed”