All the time there is an inner emptiness that the veneer of your public persona conceals. The more you desperately try to live up to the things that you say you are or the things that your loved ones say that you are, however well-intentioned, the more you must seek validation of those attributes from the people who fill up your life or cross your path. How you look, what you know, how you conduct yourself becomes serious work. When the deep-seated doubts about who you are are not assuaged, you feel “hurt” and either slump into sadness or retaliate against those who disagree with your particular characterisation. In either case, you’re not likely to sit peacefully with yourself for very long as you keep conjuring up images of past insults, hurtful situations, and the perpetrators of your hurt. When you’re desperately trying to maintain your fragile ego, even happy moments of serenity are instantly embittered by memories of past slights. When you have contracted all these ways of losing face, there’s not much energy left for your brain to capture and comprehend what’s really going on around you.
Try to accept yourself for who you are, and tear down the facade of who you think you ought to be. Remember that you are always evolving and, as such, you don’t have to hold on tightly to previous notions of yourself. The spectrum of what you are and what you feel springs from the basic life stream coursing through you. You can allow yourself to just be who you need to be in this moment without needing to indelibly identify yourself with simple, transient states of being.
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