The stories we tell about ourselves are powerful. They provide a frame for our lives and support for our ambitions- or not.
This is not a particularly original idea, any therapist or Buddhist koan will tell you as much.
But actually engaging with our stories and letting them go is really hard.
In fact, in my case, I feel like once the initial shock wears off or once I feel comfortable to tell the story, I tell it again and again, hoping to find comfort and answers, but I just grind it down more deeply into my mind and heart. That’s often not a good thing.
Right now I am going through a particularly blocked period in regards to my apartment. It is really overflowing and messy, but large enough that it still feels spacious and there’s enough floor to find what I need.
I’ve gotten used to the story of me just being a messy and disorganized person. It is part of my identity. I’m reading the THe life-changing magic of tidying up now though so I hope to change this.
Idon’t know if the problem is really that I have too much stuff- though I’m sure I do-
but I do just feel afraid to put it in order.
For a long time now, I’ve just been living out of a suitcase.
There’s a ton of freedom in that.
In an ever changing world, we shouldn’t get too comfortable, comfort is for the weak-
But I’m actually full of shit about that. Stability can be for the strong, however much it may be an illusion.
Building something, even though it will eventually decay, is true art, and courage.
Living though you will eventually die is courage.
In my case I am eager to just unpack my bags and settle for a while. Maybe wanderlust will take me again; maybe it won’t.
I feel satisfied, and I feel like this is the place I always want to go back to.
You know my stories though, and how hard I have struggled with this.
WIth doing something that is so inditutively clear but really assaults my logical senses. But no matter what my brain says- and now I recognize my so called “logic,” is not actually that logical, it is just ego monkey mind posing as truthin order to self sabotage me.
I think there’s a lot of stories I need to get rid of and put in order.
One is about my ex boyfriend, and all the things I told myself that made it doomed from the beginning and just pure stupidity ever to have been with him. Not because I ever hated him, though I do have moments where I finally feel mad, and finally feel like I can be trusted to stand up for myself. I think that is a main reason why I have remained single. It’s not all independent woman girl power, or finding myself mojo.
No, I think the real reason is that I didnt trust myself not to be lost if I started to love someone else.
And to have been with the ones I tought I loved, that woul have taken a big chunk out of me.
One of them, in good faith I believe, set me free.
Not because he didn’t care, but perhaps because he did. ANd he maybe didn’t care about me the way I hoped he would, the way I expected he would, but he gave me what I needed.
He helped me be my own hero.
He abandonned me, and I almost hated him and completely doubted myself, but just now I realize, I wasn’t wrong to put a bit of trust in him, and he did love me. He loved me enough to let me go and force me out of a cage I built for myself.
ANd I like to think that helped him let a part of himself go free as well.
Huh.
Well that story perhaps has a different ending than I realized.
The hero steps off his pedestal, or perhaps was never on a pedestal at all.
And I stop slouching down and take my place, right where I belong.
He’s no more and no less than human, and I’m no less than a heroine in my own right.
Good thing I blog.
I really do see relationships as the mirror of our internal lives and satae of consciousness. My ex was chosen by a person who can’t even properly be called “me” at this point. She is so much the sae but so completely different.
And the so- called bad guy in my life, who jerked by strings/chains like a mmarionette, he too contributed to my liberation, and I took the chains back.
NO, I am not a victim, yes, I am sometimes in need of a rescue, of a little outside help. But I don’t need to be any less than I am in order to find my hero.
And yes, I have come upon my home world, peut etre. But there will be other worlds to explore. I don’t need to tear myself down or nail myself or get bogged down or tied down, in order to be loved or whole or to find a home.
I can be loved, not simply with an extra weight and some fat and a bit of extra barrage an dmessiness and bad habits, but I can also be loved without it.
I don’t need to say, “I don’t want to be a CEO,” or “I can’t be a writer.”
I can just be them when the opportunity comes.
I have not sacrificed even one meter of one verse of my life to anything less than
poetry.
I went to business school so I cold live in the world, understand it, and lead it- to love the world.
I left France because I was still curious.
I got depressed because I was in fear. I gained weight because I stopped paying attention. I became nasty to myself as a means of protection and punishment.
I isolaed myself beause I didn’t honestly think any one wanted .
Ad most of all, I am a font of inherent goodness, and beauty. We are all eternal.