Your fear of judgement owns you and you don’t even know it
I never write about anything unless I directly experience it.
This is the essence of my writing. I don’t imagine. I live the experience of it, then I translate and record it in the best way I can. It’s like a debriefing for me. A way to understand the plot after the film has finished.
For the last few months, I’ve felt so impatient and frustrated. My victim mindset of ‘why me? Poor me’ has been out in full force, yet I’ve been blind to it. I’ve been clinging and controlling with grippy little fingers and all the while The Divine has been laughing at me.
My impatience and frustration to achieve, control and succeed is the visible part of the emotional web that entangles me and trips me up. The invisible part which creates it is my deep-set fear of judgement. This is the unseen controller that lurks in the shadows.
It owns me and it owns all of us. How free we could be without it. We could achieve anything.
The highs and lows of this beautiful life
Perspective is a beautiful thing. Yet, we only have it once we’re out of the quicksand of those heavy emotions. Once we’ve cleared the trees and can see the wood we can finally wonder, in amazement, at what we’ve gone through to get to the other side.
The path looks so clear at a distance but wild, overgrown and daunting when we’re in the thick of it.
In the midst of emotional turmoil, with choppy seas and far-distant shores of safety, it is purely about survival. Just get through this thing and make it through to the other side. Whatever this thing is. For me it’s normally fear. Or deep heartache. Or depression.
Not depression as defined by clinical standards. I mean depression in a literal sense. A deep groove which we can so easily slide into without noticing the signs. A shift downwards into a place where the sun can’t quite reach and our handle on clarity and perspective feels dangerously loose.
We all have these moments, it’s human nature to experience the lows as well as the highs. Life is not a flat line. If it was, we’d most likely be dead. It needs a heartbeat, first of all. Then it swoops and dives as we rollercoaster our way through the astonishing highs and deep, dark lows of this beautiful, raw existence.
Penetrating the layers of denial
Life is both ugly and utterly divine. This is the nature of duality. We have good and bad, up and down, ying and yang. So, of course it’s natural to dive down low every once in a while. Each and every time we learn more about ourselves. We become stronger, more resilient. Wiser.
It was in one of these lows that I hit another layer of denial within myself. I thought, as we can often trick ourselves into thinking, that I was managing to live a more soul-led life. Less ego with all of its arrogance, judgement and defensiveness. And yet. What I was rudely reminded of was that I had another layer of understanding to penetrate.
This is what the process is all about. I call this process spiritual evolution and it involves constant learning, questioning, delving, forgetting and remembering. It’s not linear, nothing ever is. Growth and healing are never linear, they are backwards and forwards and roundabout in their passage. We are layers thick in our making.
Shedding these layers to understand the core of who we are and our place in this world takes time, effort and many lessons along the way. Beliefs have to shatter. Illusions and delusions have to be slowly unpeeled. Programming needs to be ejected and wiped clean.
And slowly, slowly, we rediscover the essence of our truest selves.
Fear of judgement is buried so deep
I realise now that I had fallen straight into the judgement trap. I thought I was flying free and high whereas, in reality, I was suckered in, up to my chest in the muddy emotions of impatience, anger, frustration and fear.
We all have our top-level emotions. These are basic ones that we understand and can explain, such as impatience around wanting something that we don’t yet have. Yet, there is always a deep driver of these surface emotions and it often comes from a place we’re totally unconscious of. For me I had a sharp realisation that it was coming from my fear of judgement.
And here’s where it tricks us.
On the surface I’d have said I don’t fear judgement. I write what I write and people may call me what they may. I don’t care for them, I care for those who might enjoy, benefit or relate to my words. Yet, I find myself not often sharing my real thoughts on social media or in person.
I always believed this was because I maintain an attitude of defenceless “you do you and I’ll do me. I have no interest in forcing you round to my way of thinking. It’s cool. I’ve no need to push what I say”. In truth, I don’t feel a great need to shove my thoughts into faces that would rather turn away. We all have our own paths in this life. It’s not my job to save anyone.
However, I’ve had to completely call myself out on the real reasons behind not sharing. Behind not being wanting to show my true self.
Calling myself out on the bullshit
Fear of judgement is so sneaky.
It creeps up in a mask, hiding behind all those other more showy emotions. My wake up call was understanding why I was feeling an insurmountable amount of pressure from the expectations on my shoulders. Ones I had so unconsciously placed there myself.
Expectations from a society that wants me to live in a certain way and fit into a predetermined format. From friends who know me as one version of myself which I feel I have to keep showing them, rather than all the other versions. From family who expect me to behave in a certain way. From people that I don’t even know who might read my articles and may form their own opinions and judgements. Scary.
Yet, it’s not them putting the pressure on me, it’s just me doing that, because I care too much about their judgement. There it is.
This is why we have to gently cut away the thread that links the opinions of society, friends, family and strangers to our self-worth. For some people it’s an anchor weighing them down and they don’t even know it. For me, it’s a rope that I’ve been sawing away at constantly.
I thought I was free and I wasn’t at all. What a grand old delusion.
To be free is a beautiful thing
If I was really free of judgement, I would be speaking out about what’s happening in the world without filters. But right now, the need for social acceptance, the fear of disapproval, the desire for love and the avoidance of offence act as a damn, blocking the current of truth from flowing freely.
My message becomes watery, vague and lost in my need for acceptance and fear of reprimand. How boring. How inauthentic. How shallow.
If I was really free of judgement, I would show my true self to all those around me whether they are strangers, family or friends, without hiding behind these filters. We so easily forget that if we can’t express ourselves, we are already lost. And I don’t want to lose myself.
If I was really free of judgement, I would remove the blinkers, both conditioned and self-installed, that limit my imagination. I would start really putting myself out there in the world, alight with confidence and alive with the passion that I keep so dimmed down to fit in.
My fear of judgement owns me right now and it’s going to take time to cut through that link.
But you know what, that’s ok. I have time. I have my whole life to gently cut away this thread. It’s supposed to take time. Having awareness is a great starting point but what comes next is looking deep within ourselves to pull out all the truth. Remembering the source of all our worth comes from within and it is so pure, so loving, so whole, that no one can ever make a dent in it.
As someone super cool and wise once told me, “don’t hand authority over to those who are easily offended. They will water you down and then, when you’re all dried out, they’ll be offended over that too. Just live your life according to your inner core”. Amen to that.
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