The Paradox of Life

Spilling the tea on how to get exactly what you want out of life. 

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Transcript

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Hey my friends. You know what really struck me this week, just randomly really hit me? I escaped a fucking cult. For all of their fear tactics and shaming and manipulation and lies and deceit, I still escaped. I won. I don't think I ever really celebrated that before. It just kind of happened and I never really like fully allowed myself to appreciate that. I also escaped an abusive marriage. For all his work on my self esteem and his threats and my fears and doubts, I still got out. I still won. These things are worth celebrating. Make sure you celebrate your escapes my friends. Anyways, I just wanted to put that reminder out there, celebrate your escapes. They're a big fucking deal. Anyway, onto our topic for this week. Something we're talking a lot about in my circle this week is paradoxes. How if you desire more success, you actually have to make friends with failure. Or if you want love, you have to be willing to feel rejection. If you go out of your way to avoid rejection, you never put yourself out there. And without putting yourself out there, you don't find love. Or if you don't take risks and try things and risk failure and keep going, you don't get successful at anything. If you want to publish a book, you're gonna have a ton of rejections from publishers and maybe, just maybe, one will say yes. I don't know anyone who has succeeded at something really big where they just succeeded at their first go. Like everyone has their bumps in the road and their hard lessons that helped get them there. I think about leaving my marriage. In order to feel safety, I actually had to feel more fear first. Leaving that marriage, making my sneaky escape was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. I have the memory of driving away in my car and my legs were shaking so bad that I could hardly operate the gas and brake pedals. It was absolute sheer terror. And if I had been avoiding feeling fear, I would have never made it. If I wasn't willing to feel that fear, I would have just buried myself in fiction books and just tried to avoid being present in my life as much as possible. But if I wasn't willing to feel that fear, I wouldn't have achieved the feeling of safety that I got to feel by leaving. In my life now, I can go where I want, and buy what I want, and wear what I want, and all of that is safe for me to do. Living my life doesn't feel unsafe anymore. But in order to get to that place where my life feels safe, I had to go through a fuck ton of fear first. Experiencing love in your life is also opening yourself up to grief. In order to experience loving someone, you have to be willing to also experience grief. Love and grief are inseparable from each other. I think about how much I love my dogs and I know that by loving them so much I am also opening myself up to grief. Any love is like that. There's always that possibility that the one you love leaves. It means being willing for that possibility to be and loving anyway. If you're not open to that possibility, you end up leaving relationships as soon as you start to have feelings. We call that avoidant attachment style. You don't want to get hurt so you leave before you can get hurt. It's being unwilling to feel those negative feelings so you avoid the possibility of them entirely. But in that avoidance, you also avoid the good. You also avoid the love. You can't have love without least being open to the possibility of grief, betrayal, rejection, and pain. And that is the paradox of life. In order to have one thing in your life you must also be open to its opposite. I think this is really useful to realize. I think it helps level set our expectations and kind of go in with eyes wide open. If I know that in order to find love, I'm going to have to be willing to put myself out there and feel rejection also. Then when I do feel more rejection, I know that nothing has gone wrong. I know that I'm on the right track. I know that if I avoid rejection, I also avoid love. When getting to know someone, when I present my true self to them, there is the possibility that they're not going to like that. They might decide I am too much. They might not like who I am. But if I hide who I am in order for them to love me, then they don't really love me do they? I deprive myself of real love when I am not willing to be rejected for who I really am. If I am so scared of losing money that I never invest it, my money doesn't grow. I can't expect growth while avoiding loss. I have to at least be open to the possibility of loss. It doesn't matter what it is in life, nothing happens in a vacuum. In order to have something you must be willing to also have its opposite. I think this can be useful to be aware of when we are trying to figure out why we don't have something that we want in our lives. We can ask ourselves if we have been trying to avoid the opposite. In the pursuit of love, am I also trying to avoid rejection? Because we know that won't work. I can't avoid rejection and also feel love. Looking at what you are avoiding will explain what you have or don't have in your life. So my friends I would invite you this week to take a look at what you have been avoiding. And is that avoidance costing you what you really want? And can you open yourself up to be willing to feel what it is that you are avoiding? Those are the questions I am asking myself these days. And I invite you to consider these questions along with me. Alright, my friends, until next time, be well.