One of the Biggest Lies I Grew Up With
You are enough just the way you are.
Ever since I was a kid, somehow within my mind formed the idea that the future holds something that is better than the present. I didn’t know why exactly, but I knew that there was a lack of something.
Mind Parasites
Going to school I was told that someday I would become something. That I would reach a sort of climax where life will open a door to everything I wanted. My education was shaping me as a person. It was molding my raw edges of personality so that I could accommodate myself into society. It would help me get a fantastic job that would permit me to have a good life.
Out of school, I would interact with playing video games and social media. People use social media to depict their lives as fragments of a paradise, I could see that there were people with much better lives than me. It wasn’t on one dimension but in almost any dimension. Better looks, better wealth, better social position, and better possibilities. When I would look again at my life it seemed like it had the wrong existential design.
Other people's lives seem designed for success. My life, on the other hand, seemed to lead to the flat line of averageness. It wasn’t bad, I wasn’t that delusional, but it wasn’t enough.
Along with the idea that I wasn’t enough, I learned through my education, that you can improve. The problem was that this idea was infested with the parasite that has grown on the internet, the idea of personal development.
Personal development it’s a great thing to strive for. The problem is that some people, self-taught psychology gurus, lure other persons into a perpetual cycle of teaching them something, only to tell them that they should want more.
Pushing the unmovable rock of emptiness
I grew up, and somehow a lot of things were still missing. I worked hard and had a life that I would wish for years ago, but I still wasn’t thrilled about it. Somehow I was still feeling like there was an essential ingredient in the soup of my existence that once added everything will be better.
I couldn’t really find that ingredient. But I had a lot of ways for searching for it that I learned from the personal development books that I read. At some point, an emptiness started to crush me. I started to think that I might have to live with this lack, all my life.
This wondering didn’t take too much, because I was struck by disease and I realized what a fool I was.
All this thinking and wishing that my life would become better were absolutely useless. I had been blind to what I had in life. Once my health was taken from me, I could see in full resolution that my life was a miracle.
A lie I embraced — The missing object of my happiness
We as human beings are wired to see the worst around us. It was what helped us survive across the lives of our ancestors.
We have a hard time appreciating the good around us and we are mainly focused on the bad. This can be accelerated in a globalized world. You can see disasters any time of the day if that’s your wish. In my case, I focused on the eternal promise of the future. The unlimited possibilities that it had.
The disease that I was struck by, obliterated that lie. The lie that my life was lacking something, that I should always improve towards something. It was a hard lesson to digest because up until then, missing something out of my life was a central piece of my existence.
After going through the medical treatment process, I managed to heal myself. In the process of healing, I learned to embrace my present and to furiously slap my inner voice, even at a simple mention that would imply being ungrateful.
I believe in our day and time it is easy to be ungrateful. You can easily be fooled by the story that availed the internet, a story that can be also present in your early education, that your condition is lacking something, That you need a certain object of happiness.
That is not to say that you are a flawless being, but you aren’t either, full of holes that constantly need to be filled.
You are alive, you can stop there, everything good that is happening besides that should be seen as a great gift that somehow managed to make its way towards you.
