When he was very young, he had courage. Too inexperienced to have seen all that can happen, he believed that he could make something of himself, and so he tried to fly. However his environment was not enough to support his fledging wings, and he was brought back down to earth by some well-intentioned but bad advice from someone who was supposed to lift him up.
And so he didn’t.
Later, as he came to realize that he was different, life taught him that standing out was an invitation to pain, and so he learned to blend in, and keep a mask over his face and himself. Being something other than everyone else became something that was wrong, and so he tried hard to keep his head down, find his place and stay out of pain.
He had learned that the world didn’t much care for someone like him.
Over time, he came to believe that he would never find a place where he could truly flourish; truly find peace. Every time he stuck his head up, he got knocked back down. Instead of learning that failure is a step on the path to success, he internalized each failure as a sign that he was never going to win, never going to be allowed to find happiness.
Because he was different, he was wrong, and because he was wrong, nothing was ever going to be alright.
The difficult thing about beliefs is that the longer they reside with us, the harder they are to break away from. Year after year, he lived with that story in his soul, because it was all he could see. He had learned enough of pain and failure to feel that he deserved it, because after all, what was the universe there for but to punish the deficient?
One of my favorite authors once wrote something sort of like this: ‘You don’t need whips on their bodies when they have chains in their heads’.
The dangerous things about beliefs is that we tend to interpret everything through the lens of that which we believe. Instead of experiencing life with wonder, he came to see it with trepidation and fear. People often ask ‘if you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you try’, but they never stop to consider those who are trying, even though they secretly believe they can never succeed.
In a world where success is the ultimate endowment of ‘goodness’, the courage to try is very rarely mentioned, and even more rarely applauded.
As he grew into a man, the belief grew with him. He found himself trapped in a hell that he felt was of his own making; a very personal purgatory that seemed as deserved as it was deliberate. Even though he knew he was capable of doing, he lived with the ingrained reality that he was never going to be good enough, and would never be allowed to succeed.
But since he shared this with nobody, because he didn’t want to reveal his deficiencies, he had no-one who could make him believe otherwise.
Over time, he began to understand that the way he saw things, the way he believed things to be, was probably not exactly how they really were. And since it seemed that his life was not a permanent vendetta from the universe, he transitioned his beliefs into something more personal, and yet more damaging.
Because if the universe wasn’t doing this to him, then he alone was responsible for doing this to himself.
The transition of belief is a fascinating thing to watch. It’s remarkable how people can switch one concept of belief to another, and yet at the core, the message, or the meaning, remains the same. As the boy now man moved from one step to another, he danced with reality in such a way that he never had to question the underlying outcome of the way he framed his experiences.
And yet the way we truly escape the corrosive beliefs that hold us back is not only through questions, which are always important, but through experience. To question reality is to seek answers, and answers are merely the interpretation of an experience. Sometimes those experiences will push us forward, while some will try to drag us back into the past.
For the man who was a boy, the past was painful, the present uncertain, and the future clouded by the presence of hope and fears.
He who has yet to feel the warmth of the rising sun can trust only in the small light that he sees early in the morning.
And continue walking in the hope of a better day to come.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings