How do we decide what we are?
I never wanted to become what I did become.
This thing.
This arbitrary, random selection.
The world pressed me to move forward, and my innocent soul told to me to pause.
The quiet whisper of the soul may sometimes not be enough.
And within my own panic to decide, frozen by that feeling that some chaotic and terrifying thing would happen if I didn’t choose quickly, I chose unwisely.
The well-beaten path instead of the undefined one.
One is security, and the other freedom.
Little did I know. Little did any of us truly know…
I took the side of the world in haste and left my soul out in the vacuumed space of loneliness.
There it became rigid, stale, and unmoving. There it became layered with masks and capes and veils of acceptance and safety. It became something untrue and untapped.
Self-betrayal.
In that choice between adolescence and adulthood, I chose to abandon myself. It was there that my fear took me. Where my feelings of becoming lost were based on aloneness rather than adventure. The moment when I chose what I was expected to be rather than trusting the freedom of what I could be.
The person that I could’ve been.
Should’ve been.
The Contrast of Truth
And yet…
Would I be writing to you if not for that unchosen path?
Would I have met some other purpose, possibly even less authentic than the one I feel now?
Would I have met a demise I could not foresee? Would I have had the strength I do now? The insight? The boldness? The character?
Maybe not…
Maybe the path chosen is the only thing that has brought me closer to the truth.
My most authentic truth.
Could it be that the further we get from ourselves, our soul, and our calling, the more we recognize its existence? Could it be that only the amount of suffering we did away from what we desire the most, is the only way to recognize that desire?
It could be that it’s not the wrong or right choice that was made in history, but the adaptation of that choice.
If the “right” choice was chosen, could we have faltered and fallen even more so without the resiliency learned from the survival of the damage done by the path we hastily chose otherwise?
Maybe it’s not the epic choice in our history that defines us the most, but the present ones that mold us more genuinely to our truth.
Regardless of an unintentional divergence…
Present choices make us.
The ones courageously taken in order to be us, not someone else’s us.
The choices now.
The choices of removing the masks, the capes, and the veils.
Suffering is the Angel cloaked as the Black Reaper
The suffering we face is voluntary.
It doesn’t exist for us to diminish or run from, but to embrace. To create scars from. To multiply usefulness from. It exists in order for us to more concretely decide not just who we are, but how we show up on the world’s stage.
Suffering is meant to test us in our commitment to ourselves and what truly matters. It sheds the superficial and the shallow. It trims the excess and the unnecessary. It forces us to give more intention to the blood that we bleed.
It makes a more epic story out of human existence.
It helps us find what makes suffering worth our time. It helps us understand that what matters at our finite end is only what we made matter before the end.
Our story is only admirable and exciting because of suffering, not because of our avoidance of it.
To suffer is to create.
To suffer is to bolden.
To solidify.
The Soul’s Trust and Truth
To become…
What does that mean?
What it could mean is trust.
It could mean that something lies beyond the surface of society. It could mean that truth is somewhere beneath the layers of what’s safe and warm and known.
Trust and Truth.
Trust and truth of the Self. The experience. The acknowledgment of personal darkness. And secret insecurity.
To become may mean that the only worthy adversary is ourselves and what we despise about ourselves and feel shame for; our own inauthenticity. To become could mean that what we could potentially love about ourselves is worth being curious after. It could mean that the thousands of things we could be is based on what inspires us, makes us curious, and obsessively pulls us.
It could mean that the narrowing of time and purpose creates life. That the spread of influence and connection forces us to decide what to do with the time given to us…time that may be taken from us far before our expectations of it.
It could be all of these things without any reason why. It could be a direction that has no end, has no detail, and means nothing to anyone besides ourselves.
Isn’t there a beauty in being the only one that knows? The only what that sees? The only one that feels the way you do?
Isn’t there a beauty in being the wanderer that chooses paths because you’re pulled by them rather than forced down them?
Should we have Wandered?
To intuitively wander…
To wander could only mean the manifestation of a soul’s intent and the fulfillment of an authentic desire.
Maybe we only need to set aside social desirability and intention long enough to know our own…
To dive back deep into our own personal history long enough to see, nay feel, the raw version of ourselves before it was detoured and directed by bodies and minds that weren’t our own.
Maybe to become only means that life is a self-discovery, and nothing more.
Maybe to become is meant to be open-ended. Without boundary. And with only the limitations of burning off whatever doesn’t fit our character and deep and untapped intuitions…
Maybe to become is just what’s happening, right now.
Are you choosing it?
Truth and Love reader…
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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