It's all your fault.
Or so I thought...
Hi there,
It's been a minute since I could give myself the permission to write... but I'm back, and I'm hopeful that with your help I will never have to leave again. It is so interesting to witness how hard it is to do what you truly love even when no one says you can't, and how easy it is to do what you hate if anyone tells you that you have to.
I think this is the reason I love the song "NON STOP" from Hamilton so much. "Why do you write like you need it to survive?" Wait, that's how I feel! Does it mean I get to write? Does it mean that I even have to write? Survival… That has to be a "have to" kind of things. Could it really mean that's okay? That I'm allowed?
A sigh of relief… Before I reach the next layer of anxiety, and an even bigger question.
Wait, do I really have to survive? Are we sure that's a given? Or must I perform first to prove that I'm useful enough to have to survive? Hmm, I probably should work a little (or a lot) more before I let myself write... and let's not even dream of singing. leo, who do you think you are?
Yes. That's what the mind does to us. This dear old Bully brain of ours. All. Day. Long. And the problem is that most of us do not spend any time there to check if those thoughts are helpful, empowering, or even true.
When I think about all we could do, change, sing, create... When I think about how much we could listen, learn, write, love... When I think of how we would just be if we could just stop thinking so negatively, it makes me want to drink or binge again. Anything to take the thoughts away. Because misery likes company and miserable thoughts always bring miserable feelings to the party! Those are very loyal friends we're not going to uncouple anytime soon.
Our thoughts create our feelings and our feelings create our experience, our behavior, our entire world... and then all of this feed the next thought cycle and here again we go. Same with our brain, same with the newspapers. "Today in Humanity's unconsciousness" as Eckhart Tolle likes to say. And this is how our dreams get killed under everyone's watch.
Understanding the feedback loop between thoughts and feelings is so important if you want to be able to understand your life story and how to change the upcoming storylines. We have up to 60 000 thoughts every day... Obviously most of them will be unconscious. That seems obvious to everyone! And yet we don't adapt to that frightening fact. We don't realize what it actually means. We are being brainwashed by our own brains, unable to control and edit everything that comes up. Like a child in front of the internet.
How do we protect our kids? By restricting access to sources of information they can consult and by trying to provide context and understanding about the ways of the world. Yet we rarely take the time to do the same for ourselves. How intentional are you with what you feed your mind with? How often do you examine your own beliefs? How many things have you believed since you were a kid and never thought to reexamine, because why would you?
Mark Twain reminds us that the problem does not come from what we don't know... he said that the danger lies in what we think we know for sure. I had a similar experience when supervising young residents and Med students. They never made a mistake because of something they didn't know. They would look for the missing link! They cared. The problem came from what they didn't know they didn't know. The problem always comes from what we think we know but don't, and from what we don't even know there is something to know about. Because then how can we ask the questions which would give us the answers we need? We’re stuck with the answers we have.
I believe that apart from love, our only other true source of power here on Earth is our ability to inquire. About anything in the world, and most of all about our inner one. We need to become experts about ourselves. Then and only then can we try to understand others. But the problem is that we've been taught that things work the other way around.
We study those around us endlessly and helplessly... We have no way to know what's going on inside of them. We think we do, but that's an illusion. And a very hard one to detach from in a culture where we've been trained to blame everyone else for our reality and rely on everyone else for our dreams.
We want other people to stop ruining our lives and start completing us. We're convinced it was the original deal, and that something then got lost in translation. As if we were fragile half human victims... As if we were meant to walk the Earth to find this one-in-a-billion other half human, who has been sent into this world with the sole purpose of being the spare half God forgot to equip us with on our birth day. (Even God is unreliable…)
"Those people" made me feel this way, we say. We're sure of that! And yet... they didn't. My thoughts about what these people did or said made me feel this way. No one else.
When my best friend says she can't call me back in the next hour, she's not saying that I don't matter anywhere in her text. She's actually proving she cares by answering at all! But if I'm feeling insecure that day, a thought may come up that I have no one I can count on, another can say that I'm nobody's priority, a third torturer can remind me that life is a lonely road to travel or Bully brain can dramatically proclaim that she never was my friend anyway.
She did not make me feel sad or abandoned, she texted to say that she was busy for the next hour. I did the feeling all by myself! (If we're doing all the work, we might as well take the credit.)
You're not sure you agree? Okay, let's take the example of someone who made you feel guilty. You walked into the room and the sun was shining. You sat on the couch, grab a good book and moved to another realm to follow this adult version of an imaginary friend's adventure. You learned about the waves of someone's else's inner ocean and felt both entrusted with a rare secret and inspired to share your own turmoils and depth. You lose track of time and two hours go back before you look up, realize it's dinner time and smile. What a nice conversation you will have tonight over the pizza you can smell heating up in the oven... You get up and stretch, ready to embrace your partner but... here's the look. The look that something has gone terribly wrong, and that it's undeniably your fault. The look you will say made you feel so guilty and angry to your therapist tomorrow. Yes, that look. We all know the look.
Well, let's rewind. How did the look happen? It did because at first there was a thought in your partner’s head when they saw you reading while they wished you had been doing something else. Helping them maybe. A grocery errand perhaps. Freeing the living room where they wanted to be without you... Who knows, the point is you chose to read and you chose wrong. Then came a storm of feelings in their bodies... We all know how it works: we did not do something the other person wanted us to or did exactly what the other person did not want us to do. Hence, the look.
But here's the point: if that person could make us feel guilty or sad or mad, we would not have felt guilty, sad and mad when catching the look, we would have start feeling it while we were reading! Not two hours later when the look revealed that they were fuming with rage while we were melting in joy.
Until we saw the look, and until we gave meaning to the look, we were completely fine. If you're in a good mood and just received a loving text, you will wonder why your usually so sweet neighbor looked so preoccupied when they crossed your way in the hallway without even acknowledging your existence. You will worry about them even. If you're soaked with rain and just learned about a crisis at work, you will wonder what you possibly can have done to upset your neighbor so much that they would not even show proof of basic decency when they bump into you. What is wrong with the world today? What is wrong with people...
Oh, and you didn’t “make them mad”. You read.
No one can make us feel any way. Only I can make myself feel anything. And this is through the thought I choose to believe.
Yes. Choose.
We don't choose whether we're going to think or not. It's like breathing. It happens whether we agree or not (Good call on God's part for not trusting humans to remember to breathe... we're not even able to let it happen naturally without messing it up). But we get to choose which thoughts we will agree with! We even get to choose which thought we are willing to think consciously.
And since I'm going to think anyway, since I can't help it, my only source of power is to think on purpose.
And that's why coaching transforms us. That's why awareness is life changing. That's why mindfulness matters so much. That's how affirmations can be powerful tools to change our lives. Because we're telling ourselves affirmations all day long without realizing it, and by doing so we're prescribing ourselves self-fulfilling prophecies we wouldn't wish to an enemy. Something’s wrong with me. No one truly loves me... I have no control over what I eat. I can't sleep! They don't care about me. I will never feel at peace. I can only do what others expect of me. I am not allowed to rely on joy as my guide. My time belongs to everyone else. It's selfish to do what you love. I'm too much... I'm not enough! I shouldn't sit down and write.
But I did. And I'm glad... Those words will not change the world, but they changed a little corner of my mind. They erased the sign on which it was written that other people make me feel like I should be doing better things with my time, than sing or write.
Reading that sign made me feel defeated and sad. I'm no use to no one when I'm defeated and sad... Singing and writing make me feel joy and love. Love and joy I can freely give to anyone who needs a kind word, a song, a hug, a smile. And then instead of resenting those people who make me feel so bad, I can love my people and write to them about choosing thoughts which will make them feel very good.
I love your written words Leo! Such raw truth!