Building Realities.

I go back and forth with myself religiously on the things that truly matter to me. How I’ve constructed my reality is a reflection of how I cope with traumas, things that have made me happy in the past and the things I personally value and desire. It hit me a few years ago that in the macrocosm of existence and life, these things mean nothing standing on their own. I place significance and meaning to everything I experience, the things I acquire, what I choose to identify myself with, etc. I hold the power of making things big and small, because they are what they are as they exist. The importance of it all comes from me.

I tread a thin line with this when evaluating arguments with my significant other, for example. At what point am I selling myself short vs does this really matter to me? Am I being inflexible vs should I stand firm on this? And it always comes down to the bottom line questions - what is my bigger picture? Am I willing to put everything on the line for this? And if the answer is no, I try to let it go. Sharing your life with someone requires a great deal of adaptability and sincerity. Being mindful of this, I tell myself that this is hurting me because I am placing emphasis on it, and not necessarily because his intentions were corrupted. I challenge myself to remember that these ups and downs only feel the way they do because I have told my information receptors to translate them according to my belief system.

For all the failures that obliterated me in the past, I was able to bounce back and move forward sometimes with twice as much resilience and other times, with tears in my eyes. But this required me to change the weight of worth those encounters had on me. I had to tip the scales in a way that the negative pain would be lighter than the lessons. Then I look at the things that I pressed myself to achieve - like getting my degree before my 21st birthday, having a nice car that I got on my own and being well off for my age at the time - and how little those accolades denote who I am both then and now. My existential paradigm was dreadfully misplaced in the best interest of everyone else. I was tormented with a system I devised that was counterproductive, counterintuitive and above all, not what I really wanted. It was vital to my survival that this shifted.

My favorite poet wrote, “We are all born free and spend a lifetime becoming slaves to our own false truths” - Atticus. May we be liberated from ourselves and uninhibited by the judgment of others.