It took me years of therapy to really understand that I have a profound lack of confidence. It took many fewer sessions to really accept this. This fear, this lack of confidence is not rooted in my mind but rather in my heart and my gut. The apparent inconsistency which led to my multi-decade long blind spot is that I am a skilled accomplished person yet fearful. I was always at the top of my class, had a good job, and a solid family. I have always been able to do a whole host of things with proficiency, cooking, traveling, yoga, wood working, painting, home remodeling, and on and on. I could not continue to improve and grow and get healthier until I really understood and truly believed that my gut had no confidence. I needed to reconcile what my head knew to be false but nevertheless was woven into every cell of my body.
This makes sense when you think about it a bit. Likely there has been a struggle within me since my childhood, one part convinced of my worthlessness and insufficiency and another part determined to prove the first part wrong. Of course it is much more complicated than that, but for a first approximation this is a useful lesson to draw. Areas that we fear may actually be areas that to the outside world we appear to excel at and be comfortable in. But, all we are really trying to do is to compensate and protect our wounded parts. Another possible reason for this “overcompensation” could be to convince the rest of the world that our feared deficiency is adequate in order to grow a support or even cheering section to help us along with this silent burden.
Silent burden. There is profound healing and strength to be gained in transforming our silent burdens into visible ones—in coming out of the closet. That is really the way that I have felt for the past few years, that I am emerging from the shame of the dark closeted place where all my fears and doubts grow unchecked. I am proudly announcing to the world that I have real fears and doubts and that I am not going to suffer in the shadows any longer. I really see no other way to move forward. I would venture to guess that most everyone is suffering in their own closet in some way, or in many ways. There is no need to continue to suffer.
As is the case with virtually all of these lessons that I am trying to share, they are fungible, stackable, connected pieces of the whole. For all that has been said above, this is a good reason why we should not judge others or even ourselves. And conversely, if we have hope, we have all we need to tackle these dark closeted fears.
That we often return to the same place we started from time and again should not surprise us. If we were omniscient we would likely be able to sum up all of life’s lessons into a single “grand unified theory” much like particle physicists are always in search of the theory of everything. We would be able to identify a problem or challenge and then correct it in one try. But as there is new unique infinite beauty in the 10,000th sunset that we witness, so too is there profound value in approaching the same problem for the 10,000th time from yet a new perspective. Life is a journey not a destination.
