My Spiritual Awakening

In Mid-May of 2021 I experienced a huge shift in my life perspective. Call it a spiritual awakening, call it a mindset change, call it a phase. What anyone else thinks about my life & my journey is, frankly, none of my business.⠀
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Since then I’ve been doing work to heal past traumas in a process that many would call “healing my inner child” — a very common practice in spirituality.⠀
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My guided meditation this morning asked me to imagine my childhood self coming to the forefront of my consciousness. Immediately upon doing this I was inundated with memories from my childhood that I had repressed: memories associated with feelings of embarrassment, unworthiness, vulnerability. Micro-traumas, we’ll call them. ⠀
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What I realized in journaling about these memories is that I’ve had a long held fear of being caught in vulnerability. Not a fear of consciously being vulnerable, but rather a fear of people seeing me in my most innocent or vulnerable form. ⠀
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I wrote: “in my pursuit of perfection, I’ve developed a crippling fear of people seeing me vulnerable without my consent. I need to control when and how my vulnerability takes form.” ⠀
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I’m astonished by this realization. It’s why I feel so comfortable sharing my life on this platform. Because it’s a controlled environment where I get to choose how I express my vulnerability. Contrarily, it’s why I feel so uncomfortable having feelings for someone without knowing how they feel about me, and why I struggle to try things that I’m not certain I’ll be good at. Because for so long, I’ve subconsciously committed myself to appearing as perfect. The idea of people watching me fail or even struggle has terrified me. ⠀
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So I’ve decided to release that fear. I release the absurd pressure I’ve put on myself to attain a standard of perfection that doesn’t exist. In my life, I will fail numerous times. And people will witness these failures. I’ll experience pain and embarrassment and disappointment and a level of social and emotional exposure that will make me wildly uncomfortable. That’s okay with me. What’s not okay is that I let my fear of these things hold me back from living and loving to the fullest extent. That’s all !