Self Liberation Is Possible
4 Comforting Things To Remember When Breaking Out Of Your Norm
You may have been fortunate enough to be taught at a young age that you can live your life the way you want. That you can listen to your intuition and trust it when it tells you what will make your soul sing, even if it doesn’t look like what everybody else is doing. That you can allow that feeling in your heart to guide you.
Or you may be like the rest of us who were taught that there is only one way to do things. One way to love, one way to make money, one place to live, one political belief to follow, one superior religion, and the list goes on. Now, that one way may be working great for you if it’s aligned to your truest self. But things start to get interesting if you get exposed to new ways of living that feel truer to you than what you’ve been socialized to live by.
Personally, I dropped Christianity for Spirituality and monogamous relationships for consentually non-monogamous ones. Even my writing is the beginning of me allowing myself to explore earning a living from something I truly enjoy doing, outside of corporate which is what I was taught could soley bring me money. And there are numerous other things I want to change about how I do life. None of it is easy and there are days when I still struggle, so there are a few reflections I’ve written down that I always turn to when the journey of self liberation gets tough.
1 It’s going to be uncomfortable, but only because it’s new
We all have different predispositions to the unknown, for some it’s exciting and for some it’s scary as hell. There are psychology-based explanations for this but that’s another article for another day. Generally speaking, the familiar feels safe (even when it’s not). You know what you can get out of it, you can bank on a couple things from it, and this creates a feeling of being in control. This is only so because you have practiced it and lived it long enough for it to feel familiar.
When you try on a new way of living for the first time, it will feel foreign. You won’t know what to expect or how to handle certain things and this should be expected. It’s absolutely okay that you don’t know. How can you expect to know something you’ve never seen or tired before? The more you practice this new lifestyle, the more things you figure out about it and the more familiar it becomes. You can educate yourself on what it is you’re trying to create by reading books, listening to podcasts, following thought leaders in that realm, and so on. You just have to believe in it enough to hold on through the growing pains.
That said, there are things that will not be for you even though they seemed good from the outside looking in. If that is the case, you have full autonomy to course correct. Your choices are not a prison sentence and you can always choose something different.
2 The more you trust yourself, the more you trust yourself
As children we don’t have a developed sense of awareness, so we depend on the awareness of our caregivers much like we depend on them for security and love. Their view of the world becomes our view of the world, and that’s how we initially move through the world. We trust more in that view than in ourselves because we don’t have anything else to go off on.
As we gain more life experience and awareness we receive feedback on these acquired values, both from the outside world and internally from our truest self (which we become more aware of as we grow, especially if we’re intentional about it). I don’t like to depend on external feedback because the world can reward you all day long for following specific systems, but what is that worth if following these systems does nothing for you internally? What if even the rewards you gain from following these systems mean nothing to you except that it’s socially preferred that you receive these rewards?
Here in comes the choice. Do you trust yourself or continue to trust your socialization? It can be difficult to trust yourself if you’ve never done it, especially if what you’ve been taught to trust outside of yourself actually works. There is fortunately or unfortunately no shortcut to this. You just have to train yourself to not shut that little knowing voice in your heart when it starts to speak. Listen to it when it tells you what your deepest desires are, then challenge yourself to find ways to make it happen externally. The more you listen to it, succeed at creating what it is you truly want and experience genuine joy from the same — the more you will trust it and trust that you can create. This is how you build your personal value system, and also the life that will contribute to your genuine joy.
3 It’s a journey, not a destination
This thought is only triggering if you’ve been taught that there is a destination. That all you have to do is work on ticking off all the things on your neat checklist then you can rest in eternal bliss. I continuously reflect on the fact that the person you are by the time you accomplish a goal is totally different than the person you were when you set the goal. So while the previous you might be completely excited to be standing where the present you is standing, you might feel differently. The heights you’ve gotten to have given you a different perspective and now the goal post changes.
The trick is to understand that accomplishing or gaining things that we want will not guarantee that we will be rid of any resentment about the life that we lead. It can definitely contribute to feelings of wellbeing, but it doesn’t end there because the reality is that until we’re dead and in the ground life keeps going. And life is not found in the achieving of things, it’s found in the day to day of experiencing these achievements. So for example, old me is completely stoked that we’re not still stuck in the confines of exclusive relationships — but current me understands that non-monogamy comes with challenges that she doesn’t know if she cares to handle. So what do I do? Continue refining the vision of how I want to experience love, while remaining present enough to enjoy the freedoms that I have presently created for myself.
There’s so much value in being open to growing and changing, learning to accept and find joy in every single phase that comes with that. So as you figure out what lifestyle makes sense for you, remember that it’s not about finishing the job. It’s about staying present and enjoying the day to day of the life you’ve created, and tweaking it as needed to expand the joy. Identify, create, experience, refine, repeat.
4 There are no rules
There is no one way to live life that is more perfect than the other. You begin to realize this the more exposure you have to different cultures. What makes sense in your culture may make absolutely no sense to someone else’s culture. What does that tell us? We’re all making this up. It just has more power the more people believe in it.
The only constraint to how you live should be how you actually want to live. You can figure out the means to create it the more intentional you are about it.
All this to say, you are meant to experience joy in this lifetime. Only you know what that looks like for you. What you’ve been taught serves as just that, an education. But that education should not be a dictation, especially if it does not serve you.
