A small reminder to save your day

When you listen to your ego, you will never be good enough, someone will always be better. Your ego will never let you rest. 

Being able to ignore that voice may just be the most valuable lesson one can learn. 

-You are always good enough & the only one we should be comparing ourselves to, is ourselves-  

Life, Fear, & the Ego

It has been a long time since I have actually been able to sit down, write, and finish by posting whatever my mind threw at the screen. I have... quite a lot of drafts saved up that I couldn't get myself to post for some reason. For a while, I think I felt that I didn't have anything positive or good enough to say.

So many things were happening that were dragging me down. So many negative things kept flying at me, slowly breaking me apart. I know, I ignored my own advice, and kept quiet about it all. All this led to me, once again, falling back to a place where I felt numbing out my emotions was what I needed to do.(WHY?!) 

So now that I am in the process of climbing out of the dark hole I threw myself in, I can't help but be a little disappointed in myself. Then again, it is just one more lesson that was thrown at me so that hopefully, I learn from my mistake...that was made multiple times. 

Anyway, over the past few months, I was asking a lot of people a few questions; some of them I knew, others I didn't. Mostly the questions were for a book I am writing, but there is one thing that was present in almost everyone's answer that I wanted to talk about. (Stick with me here, it all ties together)

Fear. In one way or another, when I asked about certain subjects, such as how they make decisions, their goals, their personality, they were all influenced by fear. I guess that is the main reason I couldn't get myself to post all that I had written too. "It's not good enough," or, "I should be doing better," or any of those bullshit thoughts, are all the voice of the ego.

All of us, or at least most, are guilty of letting fear control the decisions we make almost every day. Whether we know it or not, I feel like fear has become so deeply instilled in us that we honestly don't even recognize it anymore. I know for me personally, this has been true for a long time now. Don't get me wrong, if you are one of the few that has been able to shut it out, my hat is off to you. But for the rest of us, and I know this is 100% true for myself, it is going to take a lot of work to not only ignore the fear, but recognize where the fear is lurking.

"So many choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality" 

This is the quote that made me think about all of this. When I first heard it, I must of repeated it about 10 times in my head. I flipped through some of the responses I had written down from those who had answered my questions, and many had said something along the lines of, "I'm more of a practical person," and,  "I don't let emotions effect me." Even many of the people I know or grew up with have a kind of mindset that blocking out emotions is something that betters us, or protects us in some way. 

I mean, shit, isn't this kind of what I was doing the past few months? 

So then it got me thinking, how much of that "practical" way of life, is one that is really based on fear. Where we make decisions based on past experiences where the end result was pain. Is it understandable? Hell yeah, and sometimes I don't think it is even something that is bad. It is when we let ourselves build it all up inside so that we get calloused to not only the bad, but the world in general.  

Picture by: Cuito Cuanavale

I think that is the cycle that I am trying to break right now. I think it is definitely good to be weary about some things, but not to be so numb and calloused towards so much that this world has to offer... and with the many years of my life that I already gave away to addiction, I want to experience all I can and not let fear or ego control my choices. Because when you think about it, once you let fear move in and start changing the way you think, it starts taking over almost every decision that you can make. Whether it be debating on doing something that day, some other choice, and especially in relationships and love interests. I think it is with the latter that I really need to remember this quote and try to push that fear as far away as I can.  

I think it is a part of that complete feeling of peace that so many of us are constantly trying to achieve. But, in order to get there, we have to let that armor go. Let the real you decide, not fear. 

"There are two choices in this world: Love, or Fear. Choose love, and don't ever let fear turn you against your heart."