In the case of I against I or me against me, and in the case of my life and my world or the skin I want and the skin I’m in, I have found some truths to be, as they say, self-evident. I see this now as obvious as ever. In the case of peace against chaos and crisis against tranquility, I have noted down the following.
It is the fight within that does more damage than anything else. It is the fight within that destroys us and creates a corrosive cancer, rotting us from the inside out. And so, in the fight to restore ourselves as people, we have to understand the battlefields. We have to know the fight, inside and out.
We have to understand our weaknesses. We have to learn about our vulnerabilities and rather than fear them or fear their exposure, we need to address our strategy instead of fearing an all-out failure.
We have to understand that fear is not an enemy.
Fear is necessary.
Fears are intended to keep us safe; and too, fears can be an excellent motivator and helpful, if we allow them to be.
We have fears of pain and of loss. We have fears of the dark or of the unknown, at least I do.
We have fears that can either be rational or irrational and we have fears that can overwhelm us and take us away from our best possible potential. Fears can grow inward, like a weed that suffocates the roots of dreams. This can keep us from flowering or flourishing or bearing fruit.
Fear becomes doubt and doubt can lead to an internal destruction or, again, this can become an internal cancer.
This is what decays us at the core and rots us away from the inside out.
Then what?
What happens to our dreams then?
What happens to our best possible potential?
What happens to our abilities?
We have to find a way to stop this.
We have to find some kind of remission – otherwise, the cancer grows.
If fears become unleashed and our doubts become dominant, then how can we find peace?
How can we be at peace with ourselves or others as well?
How can we overcome the overwhelming sense of doubt?
How can shoot for the stars or reach for our dreams when our belief structure becomes weak?
What happens to our faith?
Better yet, what happens to our ability to create work that builds our faith and restores our dreams - so they can become true?
I ask this because if faith without works is dead, then what can we do to overcome this?
How do we step away?
How can we create work so that our faith does not die?
That’s the most important question of all because the only fate worse than death is living a dead life.
I have been told this more times than I can recall yet there are times when this idea comes to me in new lights.
We are in the effort business.
Not the result business.
This is an important and helpful tip.
There are far too many things which are out of my reach or beyond my control. However, my effort is mine which means if this is mine, then it is up to me to make sure that my effort meets my best potential.
I can’t let my thoughts or doubts overwhelm me or prompt me to act in an a way that degrades my wants and needs.
I have to make sure that I do not allow my internal chaos to become so porous or decayed that internally, I become weak or brittle.
Peace is not won without battles.
I see this now.
And I know this. I know this down to my core because while I have seen my own share of personal battles, I have been through wars of my own. Yes, I have lost more fights than I can count – I realize that all of my worst battles were failed to an invisible enemy. These were my worst fights, both deadly and cruel, yet the truth is this enemy is only a figment of my imagination.
This is all a battle and a war and an enemy which has been created in my head.
This is where the cancer can either grow or die.
Or else, this is where the cancer can kill me or I can kill “it.”
I am not in danger per se, however, I know that I can think myself into chaos.
I know that I can create my own emotional crisis without even breaking a sweat.
I’m good at this – and no, I’m sure there are others who see it this way too.
It is easy to think our way into being sick. It is easy to contemplate the worst.
It’s easy to complicate the simple things and make them difficult.
It’s easy to expect the awfulness of some unwanted or unfortunate outcome – and yes, it is easy to wait for the other shoe to drop or to wait and see the next best thing to go wrong or become our worst moment.
I can say this comes easily to so many of us – to expect the worst, or to believe that somehow, no matter how close we get to our dreams, someone or something will come along just to spoil our dreams and turn them into nightmares.
I am sure this is a common thing. In fact, I know that it is.
I have seen this in others as well as within me. I have seen what happens when we lose to our own thinking.
I have watched others go down the unfortunate rabbit hole – and I have done this as well, far too often – forever burrowing deeper into the ideas of “self” which is how the emotional cancer spreads and decays us from within.
This is where the cancer grows, rotting away at our sanity, and weakening our posture; to bring us down to something spineless or otherwise incapable or weak.
I have seen this within myself and others too. I have seen what happens when we volunteer to become victims to our own thinking. This is what leads us to the absence of peace.
This is how the cancer spreads and rather than remission, we decay and the rotting nature destroys our balance and degrades our potential.
We lose to this – and we lose quickly too, or like I always say, we lose to our thinking the same way water loses to a drain, flushed away in the spinning vortex and sucked away into the waste-lines or the emotional sewer of an expected failure, all down the drain, and into the sump of nothingness, leading us to nowhere and then what?
What becomes of us then?
What happens to our balance or to our peace?
Or at minimum, what happens to our sanity when we think about our crazy assumptions?
What happens when our doubts become like a sore, that festers and weeps?
Next, what happens to our heart when all we think about are the worst possible things?
Sure, I’ve heard people say, “Just don’t think that way.”
Sure, I believe you.
It’s that easy.
“Just don’t think that way.”
We use the word “Just” as if it were “just” that easy to change our thinking, which is possible to say the least; however, easy is not a word I would use when learning to overcome a habitual mindset.
Our thought patterns have been developed over long periods of time.
So, no.
I would not call this easy.
Possible? Yes.
Easy?
No, not at all.
But here’s why –
We have biases. We have past experiences. We have trained assumptions and opinions and again, we have fears that trace back to different moments in time.
We have bouts with an old or unrelenting past which left us with an undesirable outcome – so then we overthink, we rehearse old conversations and, in short, we are so afraid of the past repeating itself or that our worst fears might come true that we seldom realize how we paint ourselves into a corner – and here’s a piece of truth that most fail to consider:
We subconsciously push our worst fears to the point where they grow roots so deep that our worst fears become true.
So, the emotional cancer spreads.
So does the rotting decay of our spirit.
We promote our worst fears and we seldom realize that we promoted this from within.
Let’s use fear of rejection for an example –
As a means to promote or illustrate an understandable diagram and to be more transparent and helpful, I can bring this back to me – or as this relates to me, I can see how my fears of being unwanted or rejected are so great and so deep that I have preemptively and subconsciously pushed my worst fears to come true.
I have seen this happen to me historically.
I supposed that the worst would happen and thus, I prepared for the worst and thought about the worst.
Meanwhile, I was acting as a working piece to make my worst fears happen.
I expected the worst and so, the worst eventually became true – or at least, this was true to me.
But how? Or why?
The reason for this is I was acting accordingly; therefore, I acted on this behalf.
I prompted my fears.
I worried so much that I pushed myself and subconsciously, I acted in a way that promoted my worst fears to happen.
Like loneliness for example –
Or like the rabbit begging the fox not to throw him into the briar patch. I can see where and how I lose my sanity by thinking myself into the craziest ideas and next, I act or say things which prompt my loneliness – to prove myself right.
I offer this as an example. Yet, I offer this as a humbling sign of growth because improvement takes awareness and to improve, I had to be aware of my areas which need to be strengthened or improved.
Fear – it’s a bitch. I know it.
All too well . . .
We have to break the cycle.
We have to change our actions and our behaviors and we have to change the way we operate so that we can strengthen our weakness and create a sense of internal reassurance. Otherwise, the emotional cancer spreads and we lose to a case called “more of the same.”
I think the mind is a fabulous machine.
But like any machine, we need to be sure to fuel this properly.
We have to care for the moving parts.
We have to repair the broken ends and lastly, we have to focus on our efforts because everything else is beyond our control.
As a matter of fact, I have found proof that we slip further out of control whenever we try to control things that we can control the least, like people, places and things for example.
So . . . if all I have is this, then let me take this with me.
Let me hold this.
Let me fashion this like a weapon of truce, so that I can come to a treaty within myself and surrender to win before I lose to another unwanted or unnecessary battle.
I swear that if all my negative thoughts were true, then you and I would have been split apart long ago.
Better yet, if all my worst fears and doubts were true, there would be no such thing as “you and I” or “me and you” or an “us” or a “we.”
In fact, I can say for sure, there would be no such thing as a mutual ownership called an “ours” because if my worst fears of being alone were true, then there would be no “us” to have anything that we could call “ours.”
But this?
This here –
This is ours.
This is where the remission begins.
The Written Addiction 