This week, I was
pleasantly surprised to find that one of my favorite writing apps, Notesplus,
received an update. The update forced me to backup and relook at some of my
earlier attempts at journaling two years ago. As I read over my entries, I felt
an immediate sense of sadness for I saw my younger self attempting to diagnose my
crippling sense of confusion that I felt at the time. My family opposed my
first relationship, my relationship with God began to outgrow the dogma of a
religion, and I was struggling to improve my grades in college. I performed
normalcy for each agent in my life as a way to avoid conflict. When I tried to
daydream about my aspirations and ambitions, I found I couldn’t because they
reflected the idealism of the people I most respected and
as a result, my “dreams” felt foreign to me. What’s worse, I’d created myself
to suit their idealism. Perhaps this inability to define my independent spirit
came from not fully rebelling during my teenage years, but I had split myself
into different people and they pulled me in very different directions. As I
walked on the precipice of what I thought I knew, my entries reflected the last
moments of a comfortable and painful stability. I remained unaware of what was
to come and how completely my paradigms were about to shift. Before I crawled
into the rabbit’s hole, I attempted to appraise the risk involved in trading
the unknown for the silver lining in the cloud, but I had completely
underestimated the cost. Given the choice, I would do it so differently and I
would never consider repeating the process again. Is this what you call regret?
At the core of my
unhappiness was the way I used to tether my public victories to my value. And
when they began to dwindle, so did my self-perception of my self-worth. I used
to think that loving people meant pleasing them. And walking away from church
strengthened my relationship with God but the decision occurred almost
unintentionally. If I could, I would have advised my younger self to have the courage
to “follow your bliss” and ignore everyone else’s input along the way. But I
didn’t know Joseph Campbell back then and I hadn’t exercised my intuition
enough to know that I could trust it. As I returned to the present tense, I felt
proud knowing I had improved and that I had become wiser. But I erred in thought.
I didn’t become “better”. I’d merely become more authentic. It’s not about
being the best you you can be. It’s about clearing the noise and letting your
authenticity of your soul shine through you. To say otherwise entraps you in a
rat race of self-improvement and you risk walking behind the shadow of your
ideal ego feeling unfulfilled. Being perfectly imperfect really means accepting
your incompleteness and loving the perfection of your present self. Who you are is enough. In fact, it's more than enough.
The challenge then consists
of freeing yourself from the guilt that you could have acted differently. Oprah
embraces the wise words that her mentor Maya Angelou gave to her when she
reminisced over the mistakes she had made in her twenties- “When you know
better, you do better”.
Forgiving yourself for
who you were and loving yourself for
who you are can mark the start of your
new beginning.
