Who would have thought that owning our own story would be difficult... get out of here, you'll tell me. Well, we might have fallen in our own trap and I'll explain.
We have created social norms so that the rules of the game will be known to us all. And once we've created the rules, we introduced punishments for the ones not respecting the rules. So what's the preferred behavior? Comply! Not much wrong with that except that we're humans and humans are not perfect. I don't believe that someone can be 100% compliant at all times. So what do we do? We fake compliance, we hide our imperfections and we try to cheat. We might become good at that except that we cannot cheat ourselevs.
And every now and then we silently take on one more secret in our luggage. We keep them safe and we do not realize that it gets heavy over time. And worrying so much to carry the weight as unobserved as possible, we stop being ourselves. We become who we are expected to be.
Some get sick from the weight, some get fat, some get cynical... but mostly we become not our own story. We become the story of the social norms and we cannot recognize ourselves anymore. We give up our real selves for the ideal selves and the ideal selves lose some of our humanity. The very essence of who we are: human - for the best and the worst of it.
Brene Brown wrote "The Gifts of Imperfection" and she summarized it this way: "Owning our story can be hard but nor nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy - the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness we will discover the infinite power of our light."
Don't let the darkness surround you, dare to reach for the light! For in the light lay all the dreams and the joys and the sorrows that make us beautifully human.
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