I was out to dinner with a couple really good buddies last night celebrating one of their birthdays. We started talking about our own egos and “alter-egos”, where they come from, how they’re employed, and why. We started teasing apart what parts of us are the “real” us.
My stance was that we have dozens of different parts of ourselves that we access at different times to create certain outcomes. At times these facets work in teams and at other times they compete with one another. We all have defaults that are like our “old reliables” that show up and create the same scenarios even when we’re trying to do things different. The better we know ourselves and how we operate the clearer we become about what characters are showing up to the party. Then we can regulate those fuckers and alter our lives.
So if you catch my drift, let me share a very common thing that most of us do at least some of the time and many do all the time. You know who you are.
We want love and we want connection and… we’re terrified of it because of shame, judgments, and then being rejected or abandoned. We’re amazing at protecting ourselves and for good reason the brain doesn’t perceive a difference between thinking we’re going to die because of social shame and dying for real.
We create and maintain complex dynamics to get “kinda” connected but still keep some distance so we don’t get annihilated when our imagined flaws are eventually revealed and we get confirmation that we are indeed unloveable just like we’ve always imagined. This causes us to both, seek and sabotage, love and connection. The ways we do it aren’t all that complicated. The reasons we do it aren’t either. What can get complicated is how we get past it. We have to do what we’ve never done. Dun, dun, dun… enter into the unknown.
Risk. Risk is how we change, alter, or transmute anything.
How do we take measured risks to provide people admission into our hearts and souls? I believe in measured risks. Hell, if it’s not measured at least give it a little thought and choose to throw caution to the wind because you’re bored or need an adventure. Do what you do with purpose, including risk. If it scares you, you might consider doing it anyways because you might be on the right track.
Try to do something every day that you don’t want to. As you get more and more comfortable with the voices in your head that are screaming for ease and comfort find the thing that you don’t want to do the most and do it.
Thanks for your time. Have a great day.