Over protected exhaustion

 I am sick and tired of being told that others have it worse and that we are in a much better space because there's only space for just me singularly in my life and any shift in my perspectives in my mind is my responsibility and until then gearing this statement that others have it worse feels like people wish to cut short their listening of our problems and give a generic blanket statement for their lack of time and empathy. 

In truth we are all equals as we are given a human life and no matter what be our sex, time on earth, religion, beliefs, goals and so on, we are here as souls in a human body and try and make do with what's given to us to our best knowledge and awareness and respond to life given to us to the best as we can.

Since we expect that our struggles should matter and that by comparing with others and sometimes devaluing their problems and putting ourselves up as the perfect martyrs, perfect victims and turning all obsessive, moody, judgy, cynical, critical and so on, we just buy ourselves the "gift" of staying immune to real growth which lies in acceptance of your problems as much as of others in equal spirit and not putting oneself down and minimizing one's struggles just to go along with the perfect martyr or victim, one way or another.

So, the projections don't work and neither does hiding oneself in shadows.

You owe yourself the right to hear your problems, your pain, your sadness out and give it all the space and processing and healing that it needs and do not wait on anyone to unburden it out for you and make you feel heard and reassured. 

There's nothing worse not knowing the value of your struggles, your deeper reasons for putting up with others control and mood swings and your lack of awareness of where do you stand in your life, and your conjured images and dialogues about how valid you think you are in voicing your opinions, your assertiveness and staying in a loop of fake consciousness. And I am glad I have begun to understand the tip of this iceberg and as so many realizations melt away the blocks, it's a whole new sense of flow of my energy and perspectives.

My shadows have resisted my inner light and I have allowed for my real self to stay in darkness of my unconsciousness. I have waited for my darkness to go away as if I don't wish to take any responsibility for it and it's on others to understand or empathize and since I was "supposed to" empathize with my mother's mood swings, criticisms, frustrations, I got too tired to take responsibility for my own. Others taking control, involving themselves overly with my life and making me believe that I am powerless like the way my mother did has left a deep impact of self devaluation on me. 

I am recovering from that "over protected" exhaustion and lack of motivation to get involved with my life and learning to embrace life with its unique challenges and also blessings. Because understanding the balance between our inner darkness and light is a beautiful and important step to make deeper connections with ourselves and there's no  better or worse sense of connections that others make with themselves as honoring yourself, your journey, your life experiences matters a lot.

 

Roots and self growth

 To want to stay involved in my life putting myself first and not seeking validation from anyone is my goal. Life has been really kind in giving me many an opportunity to get to do that but it truly came after not knowing how to do so and slowly finding a way through through my inner truth and a supreme energy's protection to see my journey through safely in every step of the way.

I used to think that by scoring better grades, being more beautiful, having better health, getting words of support from my mother, and being encouraged by my peers, landing the right job, having a kid and so on  are all it takes to be on my life journey, but those were expectations too many and were not fully met with as it felt I could not meet my life half way through without all these coming to me to meet me the other half way. But the fact is that I am complete in myself as a creation of the supreme no matter what be my age, color, sex, caste, physical strength, mental health, material status and so on. I had stayed away from stepping on to the dais of my life waiting for the curtain to lift up from all these heavy, idealistic asks from others and kept living life by the sidelines as if I had deemed myself to do so.

What is truly within me shaping my life and giving me a core reason reason to live is not what I have gotten or how much I have lost, but how well connected am I with my honesty and sovereignty and that's been work in progress but something I have not lost sight of. 

It's how closer I inch towards this all preserving, all pervading supreme energy, it's that fulfilling - as if my brokenness has meaning, my inner strength to survive through the old getting wiped off from my heart, and a newfound energy to embrace moment to moment and hopefully will reflect in future as the future is nothing but a beautifully connected set of todays happening and it's not a predictable loop like we make it to be, but a wave of highs and lows that we bring ourselves together to navigate and go with the flow.

Our ability to trust ourselves and our inner truths is a courageous act and holding on securely is the source of our roots and self growth.

Value your life the self worth way

 We are here on earth for a short while. Our learnings are the real deal and not the drama we think we need in order to bypass the truths within us. Do we need this body in order to remember how hard this journey has been so far? I bet so many of us would agree that others too need to be reminded that we had tough lives and that it's our "responsibility" to make others aware of it. And this is where our loop of drama and stagnation starts -  a cocoon of sorts protected by our ego in order to justify that this loop is our belief system and the self righteousness is means to stay stuck in it. 

All the struggles that make us grow up in life are needed but if we are going to be "me, my pain" all the time, then we are bound to get stuck and even bored with having come all the way despite our hardships. Do we think to release these knots so that we can lighten up and create a newer space for growing or outgrowing our old beliefs? What old patterns collapse while our physical lives exist is in fact real manure to help our newer, evolved and updated modes of thought patterns to arise and navigate through our lives from a different perspective. 

I thought being devalued by my mother was the only means to coexist with my mother as she is justified to throw her criticisms and anger out at me for being too sensitive in health. I let her walk all over my space hampering my space for individual growth. That amount of trespassing is injurious to one's emotional and mental health and there's no better way out than honoring and protecting my space for what it is. 

Emotional abuse is not okay. Trespassing another's space is not okay and calling it protection is completely not okay. I needed protection from overprotection and giving up of my self confidence, self worth and believing in self doubts so much so as if I need that in order to adapt to my mother's criticisms. 

You are enough by yourself. You don't need any validation of any kind from others to determine your self worth. My actual healing doesn't come from medicines, doctor visits, or regular checkups, but healthy, wholesome self belief that I am alright despite whatever comes my way and I am responsible for being alive and present to challenges in whatever shape or form that maybe. It's not over yet fully until you give up and also when life shuts down on you on your time of death. But until then life exists not just as a routine and compulsive habits to keep boredom at bay, but understanding through various seasons of time that we can give ourselves second chances for real and lasting change. And our ability to be kind through our efforts, falls, picking ourselves up slowly and learning to ask for help wherever needed are some means to manifest the second chances time and again. 

And if you treat your life as seen through the eyes of others, then you won't be able to meet yourself in the eye. Your vision, your opinion, your beliefs, your need for changes, they all matter. You are worth it.

Evolving Humans

 It's really important to acknowledge how far you have come post your traumatic phase so that you can acknowledge for yourself what's real at present and what's the past and not allow the past to intrude and have a say on your life now. It's a continuity of learning - your past, present, and future - it's just for linear understanding and boxing in our life experiences in terms of ego that we tend to want to get stuck with the victim mode and empower it with self pity and egoistically proclaim that our struggles during trauma is all there is.

It's the constant learning that counts and not how long we get stuck to our past. Because the past gets defined to our willing and liking in a narrative which suits our image and personality and projection on others as our truths, which maybe so, but reliving and criticizing others and devaluing others struggles or their traumas is not a takeaway to learn to grow to be a better human but an adapting to staying rigid and self righteous.

My learning is that I haven't acknowledged how far I have come in life and have played small and thought small about my efforts and staying "humble." Self confidence does not just appear because you read books or gain information from outside but the real efforts you take to know yourself and be kind and considerate while being at it. Because no one is perfect and life is simply life, not some "perfect" version of how we want to see it and keep complaining on how it isn't. Having realistic expectations from your life is key and this is an another real takeaway for me owing to the impatience I had harbored for long on my sensitive body, health, and conflicted mind and simply thought that the more I tolerate others criticisms on me and suppress my hurts, the more easier it is for me to process my life which was anything but that. 

I need to set aside time for my health, for processing my feelings, for acknowledging my hurts and trauma, and also to release them as and when I will for to work through them and free myself off past set definitions and inner criticizing narratives which keeps me in the loop as a habit. 

Trusting yourself with an open heart is a beautiful habit. Giving yourself second chances to learn from your mistakes, your blocks, and releasing the rigidities that you had walled them in habitually as hardened, suppressed feelings and emotions adds energy and path to your life flow. 

Because the lessons we take home under our wings is how far we will get to go in the aftermath of our physical, breathing lives. This karmic mileage is the predecessor for our upcoming life experiences in whatever shape or form that be. Our past karmas in previous births are why we are here, but the choices, decisions, and thought process behind why we do and become what we become in this current stream of life determines if we could get to shift gears and steer a different course of life experiences, and need not wait on our physical death in order to get to nudge towards holistic change for our higher good (in whatever form or shape that is).

The putting our efforts backed up by good intentions is a huge green flag in order to do good by ourselves and irrespective of previous births and the consequences of the current one into the next, we can know only so much and do so much. And so, let's try our best to live our lives to the fullest and be in sync with our true essence as a human being irrespective of where we come from and what color, race, sex, religion and so on that may define us but not limit our scope as evolving humans.

My life arc

 My inner child wanted to believe that all the efforts it took to be liked, accepted is worth it, and when the whole premise of "adapt to your limitations" was manifested by the older me over and over just so that I can be validated for being the weak, invisible, too sensitive person who needs to be liked and understood for who she is, it just seemed like I was left alone by myself with no space of my own to adapt to. 

How much dried up my personal or me space had become over the years of daily self doubt, not regulating my feelings and voicing my emotions and thoughts, I had no clue back then. I thought I had no choice since I was nothing but a trauma coated, self devalued person who lacked the will to step up to be her real self no matter what that is, that's when I realized that I had nothing left in me to adapt to as I had emptied my possibilities out of my living experience. 

Being limited is all I knew and all I could be and it got to be an immersive experience as if I have absorbed my mother's constant criticisms on me, and my other family member's complete emotional neglect, and this is what I had become after absorbing these limitations for so long that I became one - inner critiquing myself, self gaslighting, projecting through inner dialoguing how right and how wrong others are and just tired of being so stuck and wrapped up in my own world as that was my only way to cope up back then to survive in the family where I lived.

And when I started to believe this to be true, to take this aspect with me even when I had gotten married and lived away from my parents, I just stuck to living in my own head. I just simply got tired of adapting to limitations, and what my in-laws viewed as their biggest struggles through their conflicting times, I viewed them as their limitation and was worn out hearing them go on and on about their life narratives without taking any true responsibility I felt for who they were being, and instead expect the whole world to take a broader purview to look at their life arc and be all nice and sweet always to them. I chose to neglect them, tried in vain to create boundaries and many a time things started to backfire as if to indicate that I had broken their trust and their immense emotional involvement with me seemingly, which was again suffocating for me. 

In hindsight I think the factors that put me in the backseat of my own life has been self doubt, absorbing other people's energies a lot and trying to behave according to their mood swings to seek validation from them, and not being loving enough and accepting enough of my self, my body, mind, mood, emotions etc. 

I have lived the "other" person perspective all my life that I really didn't know until few years ago that what it takes to be me. And it feels super to just be me without having to give excuse, act small, stay invisible or anything like that in order to gain approval from others because it truly doesn't matter anymore. I owe responsibility to myself first and then to others and no the other way round. 

Go with the grind

 The sugarcane juice stall on the road corner reminded me of how grueling it must be for the sugarcanes to go through this process of getting to its essence in juice. Not far from how tired and exhausted we each are like the lifeless sugarcane that falls off the machine after each turn of squeeze through the rolling machine for some more juice. 

Life's like that machine I felt - extracting our essence to more and more finer forms until our physical form, our age, beauty, charm, height, weight, looks, health and everything just withers away while just leaving behind our essence as humans no matter what be the gender, race, religion and so on. Every ounce of willing ourselves to go through the grind and coming out as best as we can only to go back to the grind gradually is how we keep going and living in circles. 

Our nature as a human, whether sweet, caring, kind, funny, sarcastic, rigid, criticizing, selfish, compulsive, obsessive, neurotic, short tempered and so much more is what makes us who we are. No amount of make up or clothes can glorify who we really are from within. Just being real, realizing our essence, and letting go the gunk  that clutters the juice is how much we can respond to life putting us through our destined karmic cycles over and over again until we learn our lessons. 

Maybe the purpose of being here is to learn just that and give back to this creation, this universe and its creator something, a subtle spillover from the grind of our lives across lifetimes - whether its sweet, bitter, acidic, tasteless and so on is upto the creator to decide.

Nothing can crush us more than our lack of willpower which is not to go through with the grind because we will nevertheless but to accept and go through the grind because we have signed up for it. 

As above so below

Faith is the way to be, faith is the way ahead. While fear can create a huge illusion of things not being under control and hence derails us from facing future for what it is. Maybe there's a lot of comfort in not knowing the future and wanting everything to be as good or even better as how it is in the present. And that would happen if the trail of memories from the past were not immersed in other people's emotionally volatile and fearful projections. This sort of a fake disconnect with the present as if nothing affects it from the past and just repressing the past memories is enough to look towards future and expect everything would work out just fine is how I tuned my life into until faith came into the picture.

The truth underlying the roots of faith was the empowerment I had needed to remain fully grounded into who I truly am rather than wanting to assume a falsified image of who I wanted to be. Truth didn't give fake assurances that it would protect me from the harsh realities of life but rather made me open up, accept, sit with it, and simply be. It was not comforting at all. But I grew more through going deeper, fought with my acquired false beliefs (and still do), and was afraid to embrace a newer, emerging version of me. I wanted to separate the self realizing with who I had gotten used to and put it in boxes of then and now and how responsible I had gotten to being where I got to be which was egoistically satisfying but didn't make it to the cut as much as raw truths did.

Because the truth was I was never as open and wanting to receive any discomfort to want to look deeper into myself, about who I really was and wanted my image of being an adaptive,, quiet, people pleasing, repressed, inner voice suffocated person which was shown in parts to people outside and the unpleasant, very realistic emotions and feelings were buried alive within me.

I lost any sense of goals to creating my life experiences of who I really wanted to be and rather was aiming at who I should be and specially when validated by others.

How true we are in our efforts to being brave in taking responsibility for our lives and living committed to it as an act of self discipline, self love, and connections to creativity in whatever shape or form is a beautiful fresh start for me to  begin with. 

God or supreme energy beyond our powers as a human being is unlimited and our understanding of what we truly can realize, can work towards to become when we deep dive for our inner truths is a reflection of God's blessing upon us. As above, so below is grace that looks kindly from above and the ability to receive love with faith and without fears is how we can reciprocate from being on earth. The freewill to process this language of love is what sets us free to be ourselves as we learn to surrender what holds us back. How genuinely we surrender and believe in Him is how we can feel His compassion coming through to us.