I've known people who have a voracious need to be noticed. They want to dominate conversations, to show you how smart they are, how accomplished - they don't realize how often it puts people off. They don't seem to have any doubt or awareness of who they are. But you want to say to them, "Don't come at me with guns blazing, don't work so hard to impress me, don't push into my space."
Most everyone wants to be noticed and admired. I certainly do. In the past, it was all I wanted; I was sure that if I didn't have they world's adulation, my life would be a failure. That desire came out of deep insecurity, so deep it took years for me to recognize it. At first, as the insecurity revealed itself, I took it as evidence that I was worthless, so weak I could never change something so deep in me. I thought of it as a flaw. I was afraid that to recognize anything I wanted to change would pull my whole facade down.
It turned out, a direct approach to my insecurity didn't get me anywhere. I couldn't snap my fingers and be "healed." What I mostly had to do was to acknowledge the insecurity, become unafraid to feel it, and I worked to surrender it, to let a power greater than myself in turn work inside me. I stopped trying to decide on the best solution to my insecurity. Instead, I began to say, "Show me what to do in order to get free." It didn't matter that I didn't know who or what I was saying that to. I just had to surrender my relentless super rational ego.
This is a process I go through over and over again. Surrender the demand that I be rich and famous; surrender the insecurity that is the very thing that's blocking me from being my most spontaneous, freest self. In the deepest way, this is my life's work, to keep allowing myself to feel the truths inside me, both the good and the not so good.
No comments:
Post a Comment