I am all too aware of the darker sides of life both within myself and the world around me. I have known deep pain and sadness, some days I look at the world and all I see is blackness. I am all very much acquainted with those feelings of a gnawing self hate which never seems to totally disappear. Rage has flooded through my system; I have become inflamed with hatred and I have felt the hardening of my heart. I have searched endlessly in my time to prove somebody else wrong, pointed my finger at them and said look this why they are the enemy. I have made jokes at other people’s expense and sought to defame people. There were years of my youth where I lived off that stuff. I did countless drugs, disrespected others, myself and felt like the whole world was set on a course of destruction so why should I care or try for anything different. I have tried to escape these parts of myself; I have tried to self medicating them, eating them away, denying them away, blaming them away and tried running away from them.
I have seen coldness and darkness in the hearts of people around me. I was raised in a violent household, and abuse was present in one form or another for a good portion of the formative years of my life. I have seen my friends and family struggle with overwhelming hatred for themselves and others. I have watched people I know and love drowning in some form of substance abuse or other addiction. I have seen people I love get caught up in some kind of hate campaign and blame others because they can’t deal with the pain that is within them.
There seems to be both within me and many of my brothers and sisters this need to cover up and hide these undesirable parts of our self and gloss over the parts of the world that we wish did not exist. It can be so hard and incredibly daunting to really to look at our own pain let alone face the pain of others. A lot of us endlessly scramble to push these things away, the first unpleasant thoughts or feelings that come up we just want to get rid of them or find someone we can blame or direct them towards instead of just really looking at and feeling what is going on within ourselves.
There have been stages of my development that I wasn’t exactly proud of and I used to do whatever I could I could to hide these things. I would find myself angry at those tried to expose these things about myself that I tried so desperately to keep hidden. For years I hated who I was in my late teens early twenties and outside of a few friends I tried desperately to bury that part of myself.
I still do this in a lot of ways, though I am trying to learn not to and accept myself in any state I am in, but this is a challenge for me and a process. I still find myself trying to push away a lot of my darker emotions and trying to put up an act as if everything is okay. Well it is okay; it is okay to feel these darker emotions and to identify with the darker sides of what it means to be human. Or so that is what I tell myself but on some basic level, I have this limiting self belief that I always have to present as if I am totally joyful and everything is puppy dogs and rainbows. I have a certain level of discomfort when it comes to sharing anything that can be construed as less then positive or that shines me in a light of anything less than perfect. I struggle very hard with the need to play roles and to let go of living up to what I think are other people’s expectations of me.
I have spent a ridiculous amount of time in my life trying to figure out who I am, while trying to shut out huge parts of who I already am. I find myself cherry picking certain more desirable sides of myself to fit them into roles, while locking away and denying other parts of who I am. I find I do this now mostly with “negative” emotions and I struggle very hard with the desire to push them away. I strive to allow myself the freedom to experience all the things that arise within me. Embracing and learning from any experience that may come up in my inner or outer world is something I deeply value even if it leads me into unchartered territory or darker waters that I am used to.
However I find that as open as I am to this in theory it is something that still meets with a lot of resistance within me. But for me it is worth it to continue on as it hurts me far more to shut myself off from certain feelings and from expressing myself and what I am experiencing in the long run. I feel like trying to fit into roles and not allowing myself to be a whole person and experiencing things fully has cut me off from lot of joy in my life. Shutting things out has robbed me from many valuable learning experiences both about myself and others.
I am in no way trying to develop anger tendencies, suggesting that hatred of others is a good thing or trying to make excuses for times when I do lose control and my behaviour hurts someone else. However I do think it is important to allow room for our darker sides, to explore them and take a closer look at the things that make us feel uncomfortable about ourselves. To observe these things as they arise, without shutting them out or trying to sign blame on ourselves or anyone else as to why they are there. There is very freeing quality in allowing ourselves to fully experience things as they arise within us and around us without judging ourselves for how we react to them.
For me learning to share the darker sides of myself has also become an important step in my journey. For one If feel as though it helps me break out of the need to play any kind of role and helps to really illustrate all the ways I am not perfect but I am perfectly human. I also deeply care about people and I hope that by me sharing some of my own struggles with my darker side will help some people to feel less alone with their own inner battles.
No comments:
Post a Comment