Week 18 - ending 5/6: Who Are You Not Being as a Result of What You Believe?

Looking online I found several questions for reflection. Today I will tackle the one that keeps grabbing my attention.

Who are you NOT being as a result of what you believe?

I have been reflecting on this question a lot lately. The simple answer to the question is that I am not being open or authentic, as a result of what I believe. What I believe caused me to think I needed to experience certain things, create certain things and be a certain way, most of which I never accomplished or became.

To understand the question though, I think I need to go further back to what and why I believe what I do, or did. When I was young there were always 2 truths I knew about my life. I would never birth children, but I was fine with adoption, and I would be living on this planet until I was very old. As life progressed, I learned, which in turn became what I believed, that I needed to get married and have children. It was the way in which life was supposed to go. If it didn't you had failed somehow. Or if your life didn't go that way, you should be a very successful business person, as that was the only thing that could make sense of why you would never have had children.

I am neither.

I have neither.

What I have, deep down, is a desire to live simply. I don't want complications. I want to find out how to live in peace and then exploit that for all I can and be blissfully happy. However, happiness is a belief in itself. After all happiness is either in family and children or a successful career. Loneliness exists in the absence of happiness, therefore loneliness exists when you have no family, children or measured success.

That is what I learned to believe.

But it never resonated with me. I think I would be a horrible mother. I could never physically have a child for a fear I would mess it up somehow. I could not bare to watch a child have characteristics of mine that I know can cause strife and angst. I couldn't handle passing on those traits and affecting a precious life because of mistakes I made/make. As a result I pushed away any chance for family and children. I kept such a specific picture of what life needed to look like for me to go down that route that it would never come to fruition. And I did it. I was so hyper focused and specific that I kept it away for years.

Except now it lives in my mind.

Now, as I reflect on who I am NOT because of what I believe, I realize I am not open. I am not willing to trust and learn. I am not living simply and peacefully. Instead, I have been so rigid and so controlling because I was so afraid of what I came to believe. I was so scared of a different path that I ended up on it, but hating most of the steps. I was so scared that I was never open to the possibility of different.

I believed everyone else, but me, and that is why I was never being me. Not outwardly at least, not with people in my life. I trusted what others said more than I trusted what I felt. It took years to admit that, even more years to accept it, and several more to decide to live it and be OK. However, I guess mid-life is as good a time as any for a crisis.

I spent half my life collecting ideas, beliefs and assignments from others. I will spent the second half getting rid of them and revealing what I was covering up.