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Are you ready to face very difficult realities about yourself?

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These past months and weeks has really taught me a lot. It also awakened a questioning side to myself. We live in a world where one action, one lie, one word can trigger events like a tsunami. Things said in anger can cause havoc and fracture relationships to a point where you cannot even look at a person. When I look back at these events it truly hurts my heart.

The world teaches you vital lessons, and it can also chew you up and spit you out. Every day on our journey in this world; we learn something new about ourselves, about people we encounter, and life in general.

Sometimes this self-discovery is wonderful and sometimes we end up in a dark place with a mirror. I come from different places in life, every person I have met, every situation I have encountered, every happening good or bad, has shaped me into who I am today. Things happen in life as a lesson or a blessing. Both need to be appreciated.

As a trace the map of my life, I can stop at certain pins on my map, and tell you about life changing points. Tell you the happiest moment, the lowest moments, the moments which were gut wrenching and painful. The markers where I learnt vital life lessons. This map is my essence. Every peg, every marker, every line from one point to another changed me in some way or form. Some changed me inside out. We evolve as being through what we experience in life. I actually don’t know where my map will take me, it’s just a journey to a final destination. It doesn’t matter what race, gender, age or religion, if we do not learn about who we are and what we stand for, the world has a way of forcing you to learn.

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I have no idea why I tend to blame myself for every situation or action by others.  I think it comes from a place where I care too much about people. If you wrong me, I tend to justify or make excuses for what a person has done to me. I then over compensate for the actions of the other person. I forgive so easily. I have discovered recently, that I don’t learn. I keep lighting the flame under my hand, and then ask “why do I have burns?”

Every day I meet someone, who either renews my faith in people or make me question my initial assessment of them. Why did the red flag in my head not warn me about them? I refuse to become jaded about people though. I wish there was a drug or magic wand that will help me fix my overly trusting nature.
 
I battle daily when I meet people who say one thing and do another without even flinching, zero emotions. Who can twist a lie to make it look like the truth? I shudder to think how people can manipulate a situation to such an extent, that the innocent look guilty. I have met people who can detach from a person like they didn’t mean a thing. I have met people who only blame the other person for situations, never see the other side and only focus on their immediate.

Then you meet someone like me. Every action or word is taken to heart. I tend to take all the blame upon myself. I struggle to accept that some people have a bad streaks. I rather sacrifice my happiness to see another happy. Walk away rather than destroy. This is the nature of my being. I give myself completely to people I care about, I entrust the very essence of myself and when I get hurt, its sheer anguish. As true to the saying “you get hurt by the ones closest to you.” Because they are already in your space, in your trust circle, and you have shown them the core of you.

So once again I find myself at a point where, I turn me upside down. Re-evaluate where I am and how I got to be here. Take an introspective look at what I did to be here, accept my part and deal with it. Stop blaming myself for the actions of others, own my actions and admit what I did or did not do. I can’t control the uncontrollable, nor can I control other people, their words, their actions or their perceptions. I can only control me. I am human after all, need to appreciate my humanness?

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I need to stop apologising for the not-so-perfect parts of me. Accept that every person has not-so-perfect parts to them too. Maybe I am a dying breed and that breaks my heart, when I see what a superficial world we live in, that one bad thing can erase ten good things. Guess just like Photoshop, people can Photoshop you out of their lives and make the picture resemble what they want to see. Forgiveness doesn’t come easily for everyone, but the kind of forgiveness that really matters is the forgiveness that resides in one’s own heart.

I've come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call "The Physics of The Quest" — a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: "If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all – to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself... then truth will not be withheld from you." Or so I've come to believe.

Elizabeth Gilbert

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