Don’t believe the hype

[Image source : https://rogerluethy.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/dont-believe-the-hype-efficiency-matters/]

 

Everyone.  Every.  Single.  One of us.  Has hang ups, neuroses, insecurities.

They show up in different ways.  Some masked by confidence, others shaking with fear, others pursuing, driving and achieving to compensate for the empty space and the belief that they’re not good enough.

But we’ve been sold hype all our lives and this is how it plays out.

Hype in the form of…

What counts as good and bad.

What counts as acceptable and unacceptable.

What will have you included and excluded.

Which boxes to tick to be counted as good.

All of which our ego attaches to and desperately works at to play the game, to be included, to be rewarded and praised.

A game we’ve been taught.  A game we’ve been taught is the way to stay included, safe and OK.  A game which will stop us experiencing sadness or upset.  A game which we think will keep us alive.

And our ego plays its heart out because it’s desperate to be accepted, to be good enough, to fill the empty space.  Keep playing the game.

And yet it still doesn’t feel OK.

And things go “wrong” and then it definitely doesn’t feel OK because it was taught that sadness and tears were things to be avoided.

And it remembers – in body and mind – the times it’s been told it’s not good enough.  That it’s not OK.  And the hurt.  So it denies and ignores those feelings and memories and tries to be positive and look on the bright side and to work hard to get the stuff that it’s been told will make it happy.

So it works (really hard through struggle and stress)

to be successful (because it’s been told this makes you happy because you can buy the stuff of happiness)

and it gets there and is happy for a while with the glow of the stuff.

And the glow fades and the emptiness returns and the cycle begins again.

Because without a true belief that it’s good enough, it can never truly be kind to itself.  That deep disbelief that it really is worth love or happiness or contentment just can’t be worked or bought or drunk or eaten or friend-ed away.

And so sadness and suffering prevail and the masking behaviours come back because that’s all it knows.

Isn’t it crazy then to discover this game of life doesn’t matter.

That playing the game isn’t the thing that keeps us alive, or not.

We can still play it, we can still enjoy it, we can still “do well” at it – whatever your measure of “doing well” is.  But it doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t determine your good-enoughness or your OK-ness.

We’re all OK just as we are.  We always have been.  But we forgot.

Maybe we’ve all been believing the hype?

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