Hopeful Thinking - Saturday, July 21, 2018 - Feeling Fat and Worthy-ish
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That’s the advice. But you actually have to know how you would have them do unto you first. There’s a point to that. Knowing oneself is the cornerstone of all achievement. Everything, from making friends to building fortunes, rests on the degree of self-understanding we possess. It’s visible in the quality of our accomplishments, not the quantity.
We will attract what we think we are. We treat other people the same. If you think you are unworthy, then you will attract that. Your notice will attune itself mostly to things which support your deepest, truest opinions and you will gravitate toward them as proof of your belief. The same is true for all of us. We all see what we want to see and from that we make our assumptions. Our beliefs are founded entirely on our interpretation of the world as we have chosen to see it. There is enough proof out there to support any argument you pick. You can defend your worthiness or worthlessness as you see fit with ample evidence to help you.
If you think you are mostly-worthy, then the same will be true about your experience. Your life will be suitable for a worthy-ish person. And that’s a bit worse, frankly. Because we’re dangerously satisfied by worthy-ish. We don’t know what we’re missing. It’s good enough. It passes for worthy mostly because we don’t really understand the difference. Like mac and cheese from a box until you’ve had the real thing. We wouldn’t probably understand until we know what the difference feels like. Until we have eaten our pound of both. We don’t notice the symptoms of being worthy-ish because they slip, easily in between the cracks of our awareness. We don’t know what we don’t—or can’t—or haven’t—seen.
A worthy-ish person doesn’t notice the slight self-deprecation in the words they choose to describe themselves. When we make jokes about ourselves we are often less kind than we deserve. Listen to your words. As an example, we often use the term ‘fat’ about ourselves as a pejorative, a put-down, instead of just the regular old descriptive adjective it actually is. Like green or brunette. An adjective is the same but the feeling about it can poison our self-worth.
Or when we passingly call ourselves stupid, or klutzy, or uncreative. Or maintain dark, quiet beliefs about ourselves that go far deeper than words. They become feature-length stories which pick at us from behind our conscious awareness. Just a little drop of arsenic a day. Just enough to make you a little sick, a little sick, so the unworthiness, creeps up on you, reinforced by all the things we have chosen to notice, filtered by our resentment, about what the world is telling us. We find our own proof. We filter our reality to suit our particular worthy-ish-ness. We elect to describe ourselves with that glossary. Our ears hear the negativity hidden in them and reinforce them by turning them into action, into belief.
Our ears do what we tell them. We automatically manifest with our hands the things we think with our minds. We don’t see the little ways in which nearly all of us demean ourselves everyday. Preventing us from entering the perfect state of peaceful forward motion. Change that about yourself first. Notice your words. Change them on purpose, even if positive words about yourself don’t feel natural to you at first. Change them on purpose, if you wish your reality to follow suit.
The trick against those words, those darker thoughts, to which one degree or another we all of us have, is in hoping for more for ourselves, and believing that we deserve it. You don’t have to know yourself well to hope to know yourself better. Hope is always about something we don’t yet have but still think might be possible. Hope to know yourself better. Hope to love yourself better. Pray for that. With or without a belief in God, let your ears hear the words. Pray to know yourself better, no matter how well you think you already do. It will equip you for the life you haven’t yet figured out you aren’t experiencing. It will equip you to navigate toward the sweet spot. Your inner magnetic north will imperceptibly shift and there will be no trouble changing course. It will feel perfectly natural to you.
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