FEAR & LOVE
Good evening and salutations you beautiful humans. As the new year approaches I notice myself getting more introspective than usual. My self-auditing mind becomes even more exhaustively penetrative than it already is, and it seeks to answer this one question:
How did I get here?
For some of us, this can be a very pleasant sequence of memories scrolling through the good ole prefrontal cortex.
Human #1
“Oh yea I did this😌…which lead me to take that risk😁…which sent me through this crazy spur-of-the-moment streak where I started over and now…I’m living the got damn dream😆…ah what a year😌”.
And for others…there may be a less desirable script in your mind that is borderline unbearable to read:
Human #2
“oh yea I did this🙂…which lead me to do that stupid thing 🤨…and then I felt like😒…so I didn’t really know how to handle that so I threw my hands up in the air and completely😔so now I have to deal this large bag of shit that lays before me😭…what a year.
😩”
And I’ll have to admit for me personally, I kinda sorta fall in line with the second guy.
But how?
How could a being as handsome, multifaceted, and undeniably superior as MYSELF allow life to kick his ass like that? Well as smart as I think I am, life has shown me that this blunder can really be distilled down into one dichotomy.
FEAR & LOVE.
Ah yes, the primordial emotional drives from which all drives arise. I would humbly say that more than 50% of my actions over the past 3 years have been driven by fear, it’s gotten to the point where it has become painfully obvious to me that OF COURSE, this is exactly how I got here.
Now before I go into my simple, yet profound interpretations of fear and love. Allow me to illustrate what here actually is.
Ok so boom.
To keep things short I’m what you call a recovering-high functioning people pleaser. Conflict isn’t something that is you know fun for me to navigate, so whenever it arose I would just deactivate/unplug/disassociate/hit the mental peace sign you know. Annnnnd it feels good to do that in the moment, like you just got away with something. I had the “maybe if I don’t move, the problem won’t think I’m here” mentality. And sure with small things it’s convenient I guess but with the big stuff like idk debating with your parents about which major to pick for school, whether or not I should quit my job, and who to choose as a significant other-a sense of “I’mnotincontrolness” starts to creep into your consciousness. It’s an insidious mental disease that is comforting, but you know is also gently strangling your soul until you end up like human #2 above.
But what was I really doing? Like from the bird’s eye view meta-level, what was my overriding desire that propelled all of those fear-based decisions? Well here’s where I reveal my amazing definition of fear, which is really best explained when personified:
fear wants to hide.
Over a year-long, arduous self-reflection session I understood that more than anything I wanted to hide. I wanted to hide my idiosyncrasies, my heartfelt desires, and my gifts from the big bad ephemeral monster in my closet called JUDGEMENT. This was a painful experience, albeit necessary in my evolution. It allowed me to start releasing my identification with fear. That doesn’t make the urge to hide any less powerful (at least for the time being), but it does provide me the freedom to choose its counterpart, which can best be personified by its core desire:
LOVE WANTS TO SHARE.
You ever notice how you feel compelled to share every. little. thing with the people you genuinely love? The way you felt when your coworker looked at you funny during lunchtime, the memory that gets triggered of you playing little league soccer after smelling freshly cut grass, the velvet mustard comforter you just had to buy from Target after seeing it was on sale…(maybe that’s just me).
What if you could muster (pun intended ;)) up the courage to see everyone and everything like that? Who would you become? What kind of impact would you make? And is it possible to recreate the heart of a child while containing the wisdom of an adult?
These are the questions that excite me the most this year. I want to be the person who can share my purest self with this strange world, because I know for a fact that person will end up like human #1 come this December. I love you all and wish you the best in 2024. Let’s allow us to share more than we hide, and continue to Keep Our I Open.
