Why Editing My Truth No Longer Works For Me
Most of my life I operated under the assumption that I was wrong and other people were right. I am not sure where this idea came from, but I just always believed that society and other people knew more than me and so any thought or feeling that I had that lay outside of the norm I believed was wrong.
Due to this I would constantly edit my own truths. I wouldn’t share what I really thought or believed and I would just go along with the crowd, never really giving myself the ability to get to know who I was. I would just agree with whatever idea was presented to me and take it on as fact because it came from a place outside of myself. Doing this caused me to take on all sorts of faulty beliefs over the years and when I finally got sober I was awash with half-truths and mixed up ideologies. I couldn’t differentiate what I really believed and what others told me I should believe. You see I knew that as an addict my mind behaved in an irrational manner and I had learned long ago to never trust what it told me.
The thing about this is that this didn’t stop once I got sober. I didn’t instantly become more in tune with who I was or what I believed and I continued to just go along with what other people said. To a certain extent, looking at it objectively now, the editing of my truths may have actually gotten worse once I got sober.
See the thing of it is that when I got sober I sort of had to put aside any personal beliefs and thoughts I had, in order to follow what other people told me. I was told that my thinking was skewed and that my best thinking on my best day got me in the dilemma I was in, so I had to trust other’s thinking in order to overcome my alcoholism.
In the beginning, this was very helpful and it also took some of the stress off of me in terms of having to make decisions. I could just call my sponsor and support group, ask them what they thought and then go with whatever the general consensus was. It really was a great thing, but unfortunately, it also caused me to never truly trust myself.
I started to become dependent on other people’s truths and just went along with whatever they said because I didn’t trust myself. I also didn’t want to upset them by going in a different direction then they suggested, so I would just bow down to other people’s realities and never really got in touch with my own. It wasn’t until I did this for a few years that I started to realize how damaging this was to me.
I remember clearly that on a number of occasions people gave me their suggestion or they said something that I completely disagreed with and I just went along with it. At the time I knew that it didn’t feel right but I wasn’t sure of myself enough to speak up. Since I didn’t speak up I usually felt terrible when I was alone with my thoughts and I felt like a pushover and phony.
The good thing is that the longer that I have stayed sober, the harder it has been for me to do this, going along with others and editing my truth that is, and I find more and more that I have to speak up and I have to trust myself. This may sound counterintuitive because the point is driven home in us that we cannot trust our own thinking; that our thinking is diseased and at all costs, we must avoid it, but this is not really anyway to live and trust God.
I know that in order for me to be able to see the full picture of my life I need others input, but I also need to be able to trust myself and speak up when necessary. This can sometime feel like a balancing act that I am not equipped for, but lately, I have been challenging myself to speak up more and follow my intuition.
This is incredibly uncomfortable for me to do and there are many times when I just want to crawl back into my people-pleasing hole and rest on the conclusions of others, but I know that I can no longer do this. Part of growing up for me is the ability to stand on my own two feet with my own beliefs and not apologize for them. Some people may find the things I say or do weird, and that is okay because it just means that it is not their truth.
Mulling over these ideas has also lead me to a new and comforting fact— no one has any idea what they are doing. I don’t mean this in a negative way, but rather that life is fairly confusing and most of us are just grasping in the dark for answers, trying to do the best we can. Coming to understand this allowed me to see that in most cases, people’s opinions are no more right or wrong then my own and that if I truly believe something, then I have to follow it.
The back of our medallions say, “To thine own self be true” and even though Shakespeare used this quote in an ironic way, essentially saying don’t be yourself, the fact of the matter remains that to my own self I must be true, and doing so means following my own truths.
Rose Lockinger is a passionate member of the recovery community. A rebel who found her cause, she uses blogging and social media to raise the awareness about the disease of addiction. She has visited all over North and South America. Single mom to two beautiful children she has learned parenting is without a doubt the most rewarding job in the world. Currently the Outreach Director at Stodzy Internet Marketing.
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