Almost every day I wake up thinking about the things I fear the most. I’m not talking about the ones that you see on tv or any kind of gross reptiles or spiders; I mean the ones that come from within. Those things you’re afraid to think about yourself, those things you’re afraid people might think of you.
Personally, I have a very clear image of what I don’t want to become or the person I don’t want to be and every single day I try to eliminate any attitude or behavior that may take me close to what I’m afraid of being… But where does this fear begin? Why am I so afraid of becoming a certain type of person? In my eyes, what can be wrong about that personality that makes me avoid being nearly like that? I don’t know, and I don’t know if I should be speaking only for myself or if it is something that happens to everybody… I don’t know if it’s related to the education we get when we’re younger. We are taught to have 2 opinions towards everything: good or bad and we are programmed to reject everything that falls into the “bad” category even though sometimes the “bad” feels really good… In addition of being taught what is right or wrong, during our life we accumulate experiences that let us classify by ourselves what we like or don’t, what is good for us, what hurts us… Through emotions, feelings and values molded by our culture we learn to classify and seek what we think is good for us.
And even though sometimes we enjoy something that hurts us, we try to do as good as we can...
Personally, I have a very clear image of what I don’t want to become or the person I don’t want to be and every single day I try to eliminate any attitude or behavior that may take me close to what I’m afraid of being… But where does this fear begin? Why am I so afraid of becoming a certain type of person? In my eyes, what can be wrong about that personality that makes me avoid being nearly like that? I don’t know, and I don’t know if I should be speaking only for myself or if it is something that happens to everybody… I don’t know if it’s related to the education we get when we’re younger. We are taught to have 2 opinions towards everything: good or bad and we are programmed to reject everything that falls into the “bad” category even though sometimes the “bad” feels really good… In addition of being taught what is right or wrong, during our life we accumulate experiences that let us classify by ourselves what we like or don’t, what is good for us, what hurts us… Through emotions, feelings and values molded by our culture we learn to classify and seek what we think is good for us.
And even though sometimes we enjoy something that hurts us, we try to do as good as we can...
Has it ever happened to you that you dislike certain attitudes or characteristics in a person? Well I think that’s very common, we can’t totally like someone (because we all have pros and cons) but I’ve thought many times that the things we don’t like in a person, may be the things we don’t like about ourselves and sometimes we’re to blind to see that. We judge and classify someone into the “bad” category, we reject them without realizing that we might do so due to the unconscious rejection of the things we don’t like about ourselves. Those things we try everyday not to get closer to, what we don’t want to be yet we find so difficult to get rid of.
I think it is great knowing what we don’t like, what we don’t want to become. Other’s attitude and our relationships with them help us see the consequences of certain attitudes towards life and we can choose what we want or don’t in our lives, with the help of others we may become better or worse persons, it’s up to us.
As well as we reject people and things we don’t like, we have the choice to pick and include in our lives things we like about them. We can mold certain habits, conducts and even opinions into our lives; adapt them to our own style because it may take us to what we want to be. This is where I find very important not only knowing what we don’t want to be but what we are looking for in life and the kind of person we look up to. The category we’d like to be classified into. We always need to be ourselves; we need to mix really carefully what we see in others with whatever it is we want to be, without forgetting who we are and without being some poor copy of someone else. Good or bad, we always need to stay true to our thoughts, emotions and desires that our personality commands. Those we can’t share with anybody, those that are only ours. The combination of pros and cons we get as a personality, we can’t find in anyone else. We may find and share some of them with millions of people but the whole structure and mixture of emotions, habits, thoughts and other characteristics are exactly what differentiate us from the whole bunch and we’ll be denying them by trying to be like someone else.
Besides identifying our biggest fear, it is paramount identifying first our biggest goal and everything we need to do to get there. Fortunately or unfortunately it’s not always easy living up to those expectations we have of ourselves and it is not easy finding a path that will lead us there but I guess that’s what life’s all about: growing and evolving into a better version of ourselves.
