In the past seven months I’ve been learning a lot of lessons. A lot of these lessons have been beautiful, joyful and exciting. However, a lot of these lessons have also been really challenging, frustrating and disappointing. In my last blog, I wrote about loving myself through recognizing and appreciating my good. In this post, I’m going to explore something different. This is my reflection on what it means to love myself through recognizing the bad and weak parts of myself. This year I jumped into a situation so far out of my comfort zone that I’ve been forced to see parts of myself that I never wanted to see, never wanted to believe were real. And this hurts. This is disappointing. This is challenging. My instant reaction is to deny, to justify, to twist my thoughts and reality as much as I can to hide these truths. I believe that I am a good person, but I have a lot to work through to be a great person, to be the kind of person that I truly admire, that truly reflects what I say I believe in. Sometimes I can be very judgmental. I have some pretty deep rooted negative biases. I can be selfish, unkind and hypocritical.
Through these lessons, I’m continuously learning more about how God works through people, how God can work through me, through life and the seemingly most insignificant of things to show His presence, love and guidance, to show that we are part of something greater than ourselves and that we are never alone. I’m learning more and more what it means to be in this human experience, that wherever you go, humans are humans: full of life, love, laughter, pain, struggles, gratefulness, generosity, selfishness, regret, fear, bravery, weakness, the beautiful and the terrible, and an unimaginable amout of stories. I’m better understanding the value and necessity of connecting with people on a personal level, through individual relationships and through really seeing a person with a story and a consciousness, not just a body that I’m passing, not just as a circumstance or as “different”. I'm learning to understand and practice the difference between hating an idea, a norm, a system, a practice instead of hating the person who practices it. I’m learning that my ideas about what’s right and wrong, what’s acceptable and excusable, what’s condemnable and worthy of judgement are completely limited. And I include these because even though I’m not supposed to, even though my higher self doesn’t want to, I still condemn and judge people too frequently. I’m not saying it’s wrong to have ideas, convictions, or opinions. It’s good to have these, to have a code to live by and reasonings behind this code. What I mean is that if I believe that my opinion, my view of the rightness or wrongness of a situation is the absolute truth, I’m lost because my understanding is so limited to my own experience. I need to be able to say, “this is my opinion, and its based on these experiences, this study and education, but I’m open to listening to and contemplating other opinions and ideas.” I am better understanding the importance of genuinely seeing and treating all people like they are important, like I care about them and they are worth my time, because I really believe in their value and truly love them as a piece of this connected experience. I’m learning to see the power and influence of systems, and what my place in these systems are. I’m learning to be aware of how I contribute to problems and issues through being complicit, through being uninformed and through being a bystander, and how I need to educate myself, to listen to peoples’ stories and perspectives that are different than mine, to question the “known”, the “truth”, the “way things are”, the “norms” that these systems have created. I’m learning what it means to have privilege, and to not. What it means to be rich versus having richness of life, to be poor versus having limited self-identity and being blocked by the idea of the necessity of material wealth, while leaving behind or smothering spiritual richness and completeness. I’m learning humility, to recognize and regulate my ego, my pride, my selfishness, and to understand my tendencies and my weaknesses. I can’t just push these realizations away and not recognize and appreciate the lessons that God, that people, are trying to teach me. How can I ever grow, how can I ever get better and be better if I just keeping pushing away the hard and ugly lessons? I want to be better. I want to truly, unconditionally love people. I want to truly be open-minded, non-judgmental, to have grace for people. I want to be able to treat every human like they are an important part of this world, a valuable creation of God, a person with lessons to teach and with a soul to care about. I want to have the confidence to stand up for what's right, instead of cowering when I’m faced with a challenging situation. I want to be able to step away from the crowd, to step away from what's expected, to stand alone to defend what I believe in. Too often, I stand back quietly, too afraid to push myself to take action and stand up for people or for the ideas that I believe in. I justify myself by telling myself that I’m doing enough just by knowing what is good and what is right, even if I don’t defend it. I spend so much time learning about, reflecting on, complaining about other people's injustices to the world, to humanity, and not nearly enough time on my own. How can I expect myself to be able to make good, positive change in the world if I'm too prideful, too scared, too self-righteous to make change in myself? To even face the things that I need to change in myself? My whole life I’ve had these big, sparkly ideas about changing the world, about fighting for justice and human rights, about making a macro influence. But I've been neglecting the fight, the change that I can have the most control over: my personal one. I've been so enraptured by the idea of making an impact that would be noticed by the world, and so neglectful of the personal change that is my biggest responsibility. I can’t truly expect that I will be able to do positive work on a large scale if I’m not even able to do the difficult work on my individual level. I'm a lot of talk, but I've been realizing recently that in a lot of areas, I’m not much more than that. This is what this year as a YAV has done for me, and through me eventually on a larger scale. It has given me a big mirror, with a reflection that is extremely complicated, with parts of light and good that I’m learning to better appreciate and develop, and parts of shadow and weakness that I’ve been fighting to cover up, to change the angle so I don’t have to see them, but that are calling to me to give them the appropriate attention. Truly it is a gift to have this capacity of consciousness, of being a human creation. I have the gift to be able to develop, change and grow myself. A gift to myself, to be the best version of myself that I can be, the version of myself that exists in idea, that exists through God, but that hasn’t been realized yet. It is waiting and wanting to be realized. A gift to humanity, through the ripples that it will create. I truly believe that one speck of bad ripples out and affects all of creation. But one speck of good, of beautiful, of light also ripples out and affects all of creation. We are not an individual part of creation. I am not an individual experience. I am part of the whole, the oneness of creation. If I become the best version of myself I can be, the whole of creation will be slightly better. And it's a gift to the creator, who knows what we are capable of, what I am capable of. God knows my best version and is just waiting for me to realize it myself. I believe that God, that the spirit of life and love and light rejoices when creation realizes its potential, when creation truly lives through its goodness and love. What I’m now striving for, is the ability to say that I would prefer to live in a dirt house, with just the basic necessities to survive, without any shiny possessions or fancy titles, but to be the best person I can be, to be the absolute best version of myself, than to be a mediocre version of myself with a fancy title and “impressive” accomplishments and material wealth. The truth is, as of this point in my life, I cannot honestly say this. As of this point in my life, what I think I would prefer is the material comforts, the societal success. But this isn’t what my soul is searching for, this isn’t what God meant for my life to be. God didn’t create me to be able to say that I have “x” position, living in “x” neighborhood with “x” awards. God created me to be the best version of myself possible. And so now, my fight is to really reflect this spirit, this purpose, and not the one that has been created in me by a broken society. Through these lessons, I am recognizing more how important it is to candidly, honestly see the bad, the ugly, the weakness and recognize it. To see the truth of these, and instead of making excuses for and justifying them, realistically looking at where they come from, how they have been formed, and what my tendencies and habits around these bad thoughts, reactions, or lack of actions are. It’s also important to say that I don’t think it's healthy or impressive to just focus on these parts of myself. It's also important to honor and recognize the good and the beautiful that is in me, and that I put into the world. And I think being a human means that continuously we have to learn how to balance the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. To balance the attention and the focus we give to these, the energy and power we give to these. And I don’t think it's healthy or useful to punish myself, to judge myself for these parts that are weak. The treatment that I want to give to other people, I must first learn how to give to myself. So, I need to learn how to show myself compassion and understanding, while also allowing myself to see all of myself, and to give constructive criticism as necessary. To give pep talks and applause as necessary. To make change as necessary.
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