I’ve Been Using Crutches My Whole Life — But I’m Not Injured

Crutches can take many forms.

I’m not injured now, but that wasn’t the case a couple years ago.

I suffered a bad leg injury a fews years ago and had to use crutches for a couple weeks to support myself during my recovery.

Over the course of those few weeks, something really interesting happened.

At first, my injury was so bad that I wouldn’t have been able to get around and go to school had it not been for these supportive devices. However, as time went on, my leg began to heal and the crutches became less and less necessary.

The funny thing was — I was still using the crutches even though I didn’t really need them.

I had started to become dependent on them and accepted them as part of my reality. It’s not that I liked them, in fact they were terribly uncomfortable. But they were easy. They were convenient.

Rather than trying to take my injury head on and ditch the crutches to endure short pain for long term gain, I held onto them. In fact, I think this inhibited my recovery because I never pushed my knee and it’s muscles to force them to strengthen and heal faster. I accepted the crutches as a convenient truth and made them my reality; which ended up being to my own detriment.

My leg eventually healed, but I still used the crutches. In fact, I still use them today. And they still hold me back.

I don’t still walk around with plastic poles shoved up my arm pits… but my crutches have taken different forms.

“Well, I’m just a logical thinker so I don’t see things that way.”

“I’m sorry, I just get really cranky when I’m tired. That’s just the way I am.”

“I’m just not a morning person, so that can’t work for me.”

“I’ve never been good at taking action on things, that’s just my personality I guess.”

These are my crutches.

These are the self made realities that I live by on a daily basis.

Am I really all of those things? Yes, but only because I’ve accepted them as my reality.

I truly believe that the mind is the most powerful tool we have to control our own lives. What we perceive to be true is true. What we perceive to be false is false. But only because we think it’s that way. And we accept it.

But it doesn’t have to be like that.

What if we took these crutches head on and tossed them aside? What if we created new realities for ourselves that challenged the “truths” that we have accepted about ourselves.

I believe we have the power to do that.

The thing is, crutches might do us good for a while. They help to rationalize why we are the way we are. But then we no longer need them. But we hold on…

What if we had the power to change the things that we accepted to be truths about ourselves? Imaging how powerful that would be. Imagine how the world might be different. Imagine how you might change.

What crutches are you holding onto that aren’t benefitting you? It’s time to cast them aside.