Wow, it has been a crazy few weeks. But I told myself, "Self! You need to write more in your blog."
Self: "but what if they judge me?"
Self: "Get over yourself, Self! It's not all about you!"
Self: "Then what's it about?"
Self: "Meeeeee!! Muhahahahaha!"
And now it is time for the reading comprehension test.
Q: Who is "they" in the snippet above?
...
Tick
...
Tock
...
Tick
...
A: If you answered "Meeeeee!! Muahahahaha!", you have guessed correctly.
There is a certain irony that fear of being judged by others is actually us judging ourselves before even giving other people the chance.
I am done with that. I have judged myself enough. It's time to "get outside the building" as they say.
In truth I have been publishing for years, so I am not sure how this post even became a thing. Oh wait. . . the nightmare yesterday. Yup, that probably had something to do with it. I had this extraordinarily gruesome horror of a nightmare.
The content was so graphic and so traumatizing that I cannot recant it here. I won't recant it anywhere - not even in a personal journal. But at the root of that nightmare was an issue I needed to address (as it usually goes).
Our subconscious is very good at bubbling up quite the tapestry of content. This nightmare touched on everything all in about 5 seconds. It touched on my self-sabotaging beliefs, it touched on my guilt for leaving the kids behind when I went through my divorce, it touched on how not facing this energy was imprisoning me.
I started searching the internet, because I was quite disturbed by what I had just witnessed, and the term that seemed to be in use in the "industry" was "intrusive thoughts." This dream dropped like a bomb, and I considered it quite intrusive. The other buzzword I picked up was CBT. . . Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Anyway, thanks to the power of the internet it didn't take long to piece this together: the thoughts were bubbling from a place of stress/anxiety, and the first step towards healing was accepting the thoughts and then working past them into the message my mind was delivering.
Now that I am on the other side of that, I realize I have this mounting fear of being judged. I have a court case coming up (judging), I am trying to rebuild my relationship with my children after the divorce (judging), I am involved in several new business ideas (judging) and I am writing this post (more of the judging). Clearly . . . I AM BEING JUDGED. It took a while for me to decipher all this, but it is just amazing that my body could tell me all that in one 5 second graphic display.
Now that I know what it means, I feel a bit liberated. It isn't because I can predict how I will be judged, but just the acceptance that there is a whole lot of judging going on, and the only thing I can control is me, my feelings and my next move. It makes it easy to accept that being judged is part of being here and on the other side of that fear is kinda like the fear of being told no.
Me: "Will you affirm this super important XYZ thing for me?"
Them: "No."
Me: "Ahghghghghghg. Agh! . . . . Agh . . . " (flop on the ground)
[3 days later]
Me: "Agh! Agh. ahhhh...guh...hmmm...well. . . OK then, I want pizza."
And then we move on.