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I remember this moment very well. It was a lonely and quiet night in which nothing spectacular was happening. Just an 18-year-old kid sitting in his room. At that time, the only place in the world where I could at least somehow be calm. And as you would expect the silence of said night made the voices in my head a bit louder.
„You are not good enough. You should go out and do something with your life. You should hook up with some girl you don’t even know. Because if you don’t do this, you will never be accepted.
You are not allowed to show feelings. You are not allowed to show weaknesses. You are not allowed to make mistakes. Because if you do, everybody will laugh at you and hate you.
The others aren’t struggling either. They are just waiting for you to fuck something up so they can judge you. So they can look down on you. Because you are not lovable enough for them.“
Words like these flashed across my mind all the time and it was pretty much impossible for me to feel good about myself in any way. I wanted to be a person that was free of all negativity, but I became so obsessed with focussing on my negative sites, that I forgot what my positive sites had been to begin with.
When something good happened to me it would’ve always been too good to be true for me. I didn’t even realize when someone did really like me, because I was so trapped in my own thoughts and world. So ultimately I banned all the positive things out of my life and was left alone with this big bunch of negativity.
I was so busy with reaching goals no human could possibly ever achieve. Being liked by everyone, attracting every single girl on this planet, having no weaknesses. While making not a single mistake. These „goals“ were so unrealistic, but I really believed that I just didn’t reach them, because I didn’t put in enough effort. So I tried more and more. And I tried to suppress my actual self more and more in order to be how I thought I had to be.
I was so afraid of the most humane things existing in everyone of us.
I didn’t want to show my feelings, because they would make me vulnerable. I didn’t want to be vulnerable, because that would mean being different, being a mistake. I didn’t want to make mistakes, because people would have judged me for that. They would have stopped to accept me. And if you are not accepted you will eventually just fall apart.
But ironically enough my actual needs turned out to be the embodiment of humanity itself.
Actually I just wanted to be loved and accepted for being who I truly was. But how could I possibly achieve something like that, if I was too scared to show the things that define who I truly was? I was very clueless up to said night and I didn’t know what to do anymore. Suddenly I found myself being in a big dilemma.
There are times where we humans can feel so fragile. Where we just aren’t able to differentiate between what is right and what is wrong. Where we are so desperately trying to hold everything we have together and are so occupied in defending the building we call our worldview. Where we want to prevent the foundation of what we deeply believe in from collapsing. Where we are so afraid of seeing everything giving up the ghost in front of us.
Because we know, when this building is demolished all we’re going to have left is nothing. And we are so scared of not knowing what is going to happen after that.
However, that certain night, I didn't feel that way.
I was so tired of fighting for the beliefs I had back then. And I was lacking the energy to hold it all together for any longer. After one and a half years I was just done. The pain, the struggles, this fight. I couldn’t bear with it all any longer. I was plain exhausted.
This just couldn’t be what is called living a nice life. Living a nice life just couldn’t result from banning every aspect of your personality and humanity. One and a half years before said night I made a decision in order to feel better about myself and be happier. Nothing has changed since that day. It even got worse to be honest. I was the unhappiest person in the world back then, because of said decision.
So I just stopped.
Trying to hold everything together. Defending my worldview. Preventing the foundation of my beliefs from collapsing. I just let everything I was thinking about the world or myself give up the ghost. I just let myself have left nothing without being scared of the consequences.
I just stopped giving a fuck about that. And as a result somewhere in me a barrier broke down allowing many things I kept outside of myself for a long time to flow into my world again.
Suddenly my world of black and white started fading away. Everything I saw, I felt, I thought took on color. Suddenly I could feel so much kindness from the bottom of my heart.
I started to embrace everything that had something to do with me. My body, my fears, my flaws, my failures. Suddenly everything I felt was so warm and so gentle that I just weren’t able to judge myself for not being perfect anymore.
It felt as if I was forgiving myself for what I did the past eighteen months. And suddenly my mask fell off and what became apparent was the face of a crying little boy. Not crying because he was sad, but because for the first time in his life he has felt truly deep joy.
I was born anew, crying like a baby that had no idea how its life would turn out to be. I felt like an infant that had no idea where his boundaries were. I felt like a youngster who had learned a new lesson, but in comparison to his life as a whole it was only so much. But in the end I felt like myself. An 18-year-old wannabe-adult who had just had the best moment of his life so far.
Ultimately we’re all like little kids. When we cover our faces with our hands so no one will be able to see us. But by doing that we are also preventing ourselves from seeing the world as it truly is.
We need to remove our masks and show our true faces risking to be seen in order to be liked for who we are. Because if we stop putting the focus on our own imperfection, but rather on what is happening around us, if we just start to observe without judging, we will eventually realize that everybody on this planet is fighting their very own battle, their own game of hide-and-seek. And eventually we will understand that we’re all in the same boat.
I totally closed my mind to the world, because I was so scared of what other people would think of me. But it extremely relieved me after I tried to show myself. Of course that wasn’t always easy, but I got so much from it.
The following weeks would turn out to be an emotional rollercoaster. Not only, because I did everything different from then on, but also because of allowing myself to receive love.
