Was it really all there is?

That question popped up one time, when I slowly realized I might be settling for something because I wasn’t looking well enough at myself to know what I really deserve.

Someone once gave me advice that I didn’t ask for. But the question had already arrived before the advice. It’s like repeating something you’ve been asking yourself over and over. The annoyance didn’t start with the advice. It started the moment I kept asking myself the same question again and again.

We all have questions in us, and possibly the answers to most of them. It’s not even the answers that seem to be the problem. It’s the fear of doing the act, whether that’s leaving or doing the thing we’ve been hesitating on, because we’re too stuck on the cons more than the pros.

We do need advice on some things. But we never needed to find external solutions to our inner problems, because at the end of the day, our viewpoint on our experiences will never be the same as anyone else’s. It’s not about being closed to advice. It’s knowing what’s welcome and what needs to be handled by ourselves.

We always want fast answers, but some questions don’t need to be answered right away. It takes time, and an accumulation of reflections and thoughts, to find the right one. If we don’t know where our problems came from, we just need to look deeper into our past experiences, or into our current viewpoints in specific situations.

It comes back to ourselves. It’s knowing ourselves so well that deep down we know settling was never a goal. When we’re not looking well enough at ourselves, we don’t know what we really deserve, and that’s how we end up settling.

It’s being the right person for ourselves. It’s treating ourselves so well that meeting that standard becomes a requirement. We never need someone else’s standard if we already are one. We need someone to meet us there and bring us higher, not the other way around.

Being unaware isn’t about going with the flow. It’s not knowing the reason behind our behavior, feelings, and motives. It’s the endless modification of our good traits because someone wasn’t meeting them.

We never needed to modify a room just because a visitor didn’t like it. We modify a room because it makes us feel cluttered, and not because someone said so.

I wish someone had told me this: try not to settle for something we already know. Be open to things. How we see ourselves now might change, because at the end of the day, we also change, and so do our perspectives. Holding on to what we consider now would only keep us stuck and away from better things. Hopefully we become the better version of ourselves.

Looking at ourselves is asking the right questions, however hard they are to answer. It’s sitting with them, figuring out what’s been taking us so long, and reflecting on our actions until we find the right answer.

A projection is when someone in front of us shows something we’ve been denying to ourselves. It’s worth looking at our patterns before anyone can even start showing projections.

For example, we might already know ourselves in the ways we feel we lack communication skills, or in how good we are at analyzing. That’s the start of knowing ourselves a lot deeper. We might realize that we don’t lack communication skills, but have a fear of being judged. Or that we’re good at analyzing because we grew up in a society where our actions were being analyzed.

When someone shows the same struggles, we’ll have enough clarity to see that in every room there’s someone who shares them. We’re only helping each other figure things out when we look at struggles not as a way to judge or feel judged, but as a way to learn more about ourselves and how we handle those things, imperfectly perfect.

Clarity isn’t found when we feel better. It’s seeing ourselves in every path we take.

Noticing a pattern doesn’t need to be painful. It’s being honest about where it actually came from, so we can stop repeating it without realizing we’re the ones still doing the repeating. We just need to face it head on and know that we all have patterns in us. The fact that we’re willing to face them shows our true character. Being at peace with ourselves is taking accountability for our own mistakes, but never letting them drag us to a place we never want to stay in. We can treat them as data, to know which patterns we’ve been settling for need improving and which need to stay in the past, so we can move forward.

Clarity is knowing that in every journey, there’s still a part of us that needs to stay. It’s not about being fixed at something. It’s about knowing ourselves, so that whatever we face in front of us won’t take us farther from ourselves, but will make us an improved version of ourselves. There’s a difference between being dragged and being guided.

.aletheia