And what I am realizing is that I entered adult life with a profound sense of helplessness. This was carefully engineered into me by my parents. This is not a revolutionary idea.
What is new for me is the realization that in the process of rejecting this feeling, of denying it, of trying to pretend that I am much more confident than I am, that things are much more in control than they in fact are, that it has been easier to engineer failure as a result of pride, than to admit what I was feeling. I would rather protect a false sense of self, and crash the ship, than go there and be with something unpleasant.
No one could accuse me of avoiding negative feelings, but what I am coming to realize is that going into these feelings with compassion, and granting them the space to be, without trying to alter them, without trying to will them into non-existence or hiding, is the only path forward for me. Everything else leads to a combination of arrogance, anger, and resentment, which in turn lead to regret and failure.
Some wise person once wrote that “forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past”. My new motto then is “abandon all hope of being someone other than who you are.”
And when I say who I “am” I am looking deeply, very introspectively. What you have done is unimportant compared to why and how you did it. At the very bottom is where one finds the genuinely spiritual. The task it to connect with that energy, identify with it in all its variegated beauty, and learn to expand and learn from it. This is the purpose of life.