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bambinambi · 2 days

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The cost of betraying one's self

For the last three years, I've felt like I had to relearn who I was, relearn lessons that were imbued upon me from childhood (through self-reflection as an adult), I've had to relearn societal rules (through awkwardly fubbling through social interactions), and whether I even want to abide by these social rules or not. More and more, I start understanding my past self and accepting her after years of rejecting and being embarrassed of her, as I come back into myself. But I feel like I began navigating this rebirth in the wrong manner.

I approached it in a manner in which I believed there were objectively a right and wrong way of doing "life", in part due to having befriended certain people that thought that who I was, how I thought and how I sought to navigate the world were wrong because it did not make sense to them, but also by accepting and internalising their critiques instead of recognising them as very strong subjective opinions. While I could be very stubborn, I also had a porous mind. I feel like it is in my nature to be attracted to anyone who wants to bestow me with any new knowledge or different perspectives that I can mull over, being a mrigashira native. The only issue was that instead of giving me new perspectives, they belittled and ridiculed my thought processes. And I knew that they were opinions to begin with, but the more I recognised that the world around me agreed with them, the more I started to question whether how I perceived the world around me was "correct".

I watched a video by Claire Nakti that spoke about people copying you/stealing your destiny, and she gave an analogy that went along the lines of, "when you decide to take in information that someone else has discovered, instead of eating the fruits of knowledge that they consumed, you end up eating the excrement of the people who ate the fruit" (I said it in a far my crass manner but you get the gist of what I'm saying). Not only do you not take in the full knowledge or wisdom, but you will also often misinterpret what you are hearing and seeing, and subsequently impose these incorrectly understood lessons and ideas onto your life, and potentially others, because you have not made sense of these lessons from your own point of view, nor attained the wisdom, through experience, attached to these lessons. But not only that, you end up not living out your own destiny by attempting to steal another's. This is probably why incredibly wise people are usually portrayed as very old in media. Someone that has lived that long has had many many experiences but also the time to learn and wisen due to them.

I'm not going to speak on this too much because ultimately, you could always just go watch Claire's video for more information on Ketu and Rahu, and it's relation to making sense of the world with the knowledge you came into the world with, and also your own acquired wisdom that one gains as you navigate the world. Going back to my own personal story, I will not say whether my friends interpretations of the world were "correct" or "incorrect", or whether now that I'm in a different state of mind, I agree with them. What I will speak on is the danger of betraying oneself in the pursuit of really anything. For me, it was the pursuit of social acceptance and assimilation into spaces that may not have been for me and in spaces, that I myself may not have wanted to be in, if I were being honest with myself.

We all likely have friendships in which we have much in common with our friends, and also differ in many ways from. I've always wonder why I had friendship groups in which we differed in many ways, and this always fascinated me, and I could never make sense as to why our friendships worked. Maybe I enjoyed these friendships because they always had people with differing ideas to that of my own that made me really "think" and question my own view points, that's these friendships were stimulating, as I am a person that loves to question. My friendship with these two particular friends hinged on a shared love of similar music and interests as most friendships do but differed in how we perceived the world greatly. Instead of agreeing to disagree, my friends sought to change my perspective through belittling, triangulation, and bullying. I recognised that I wasn't happy in the friendship, but I stayed in that relationship, longer than I should have, due to fear of being alone. COVID came around, and I thought I would spend the year 2020 "fixing" myself, as many other people sought to do. I threw myself into a ton of psychology content so I could psycho-analyse myself and effectively learn where I needed to improve in myself and my approach to my interpersonal relationships. What made the whole process near impossible, is that I was dealing with a severe case of moral perfectionism, in which I thought that the times in my past in which I had caused harm to people, were like blemishes on my being that I could never get rid of, like they would haunt me for my entire life, and would never be able to separate myself from having been that person. You can't move on from past versions of yourself if you think you'll always be tethered to them. Also, trying to take in all this knowledge, that didn't resonate with me at the time, was also incredibly overwhelming, but also useless, and I could never incorporate what I learnt effectively into my life, because it did not come naturally to me. I honestly blame myself for having bought into the ideas surrounding cancel culture, because if you're not willing to forgive and allow someone to move on with their lives after having made past mistakes, how can you do that for yourself?

I also really got into astrology, so I could learn how to read my birth chart with the sole purpose of understanding what my flaws and shortcomings were in this lifetime so I could correct them. I had spent a great deal of my adolescence being bullied by age-mates and even past friends and I think these experiences also informed this idea that there had to be something fundamentally wrong with me to have experienced all of it, and that if I could dig into myself and expel it from my being, I could subsequently be treated better by the world.

Slight sedgeway from the video, but I want to say that once, I was speaking to my mom, and I asked her if I should change my approach on a specific situation I was experiencing, and she told me not to allow people to change who I am, meaning don't allow other people's behaviour towards you change who you are, and how you would react to a situation. By allowing someone to influence your behaviour, or "matching their energy", you're giving someone else power over yourself, and how you would actually react to a situation if you were being your authentic self, which could be a big price to pay for simply wanting to stroke your ego. Also, when you have to answer for your behaviour or words, you'd feel a lot more confident in your past actions by actually believing in what you've done and said, instead of it coming from a place of fear, in some cases, or ego.

So, getting back to trying "to fix" myself; in trying to do so, I think I experienced the actual death of my mind and soul. I should mention that I have always had a habit of ridding myself of the past to make way for who I want to be in the present (I'm not sure if this is due in part to my heavy pluto influence in my chart), example, I always liked getting rid of old art because I had discovered a different art style. And so my nature of always wanting to start completely anew or on a clean slate had ultimately bit me in the ass, because in my bid to "fix myself", I found that I had rid myself of everything about my being; my personality, my opinions, my temperaments, the things I cared about, the things that drive me.

I really didn't know who I was or what I believed in. I had no idea what kind of person I was even trying to work towards being because I sought to destroy the foundations, that I had taken years, leaving me with no real basis to start with but also leaving me an empty shell or husk.

I spent a year and a half in a state of derealisation and depersonalisation. I existed in a state of limbo. When you experience depersonalisation and derealisation, it's like being underwater. You can't process information as well. I honestly don't know how I got through my third year in that state. You're never really present, and even when you perceive things going on around you, you sense these things, but sometimes you don't really process them in your mind. It's like the saying, "going through one ear and out the other." I think it's relevant to mention that I had no hobbies and I found that I struggled listening to new music, in fact I found myself wanting to listen to music that my dad would play when we were children, almost as a form of comfort, but also (and this ties back to the whole premise of this post) as if I had regressed to being a child again. When I came out of that state, I found that I had to relearn a lot of things, that I most likely knew before but just couldn't remember, almost like I was starting over again, from the beginning.

And by the way, this is not a sob story. I knowingly betrayed myself by being in a relationship with people who I knew did not truly like or accept me for who I was but I unknowingly betrayed my soul by completely destroying the growth that I had made up until I would said my 19th year. And why I mentioned Claire Nakti's video earlier is because ultimately, what I would like you take away from this message, is that on the one side, there is a lot to learn from others, but in your pursuit of knowledge, make sure that even when you seek to learn from others, that their messages resonate with you, so as not to be led astray. Also, become comfortable with walking the path less travelled, especially when it resonates with you. I was so set on being accepted that I completely neglected the voice that told me that the ideas being imposed onto me didn't resonate with me, that I didn't actually like the people I desperately wanted to approve of me, that who they were was not who I wanted to be, nor wanted to be associated with anyway. Essentially, if you've ever been through what I've been through, my advice to all of us, actually really for anyone, is to worry less about whether you're getting it "right", and to worry more about whether it feels right to you.

Subsequently, making this discovery also made me wonder how I would raise my children, like would I act as a guide or assistant. Growing up, my parents furiously imposed their beliefs onto us as children, which I subsequently rejected, not only because it didn't make sense to me at the time, but also because I needed to gain my own understanding to really develop these beliefs for myself. And so the way I think I'll go about parenting my children, is to gently advice them, so they would be more accepting of the advice but also try to ensure that I'm giving them these lessons in a manner that they can understand and make sense of for themselves, and not be frustrated when they decide to make decisions that go against my advice because ultimately, people learn better from experience than being told what to do, especially children. Life isn't a test, it's an experience, you're allowed to fuck up, you're allowed to become a different person overnight, don't rush the process, because ultimately, the destination will be there when you finally get there.

It almost feels like I am having a similar experience to Bella Baxter from 'Poor Things', in the sense of discovering the world, one' s self, how the world reacts to me and how I subsequently react to the world, anew. The only difference being that I had a detailed understanding of my past self, that made my relearning of myself and the world staggered, as I desperately attempted to cling onto who I once was, once I realised that I had completely destroyed the version of myself that I loved and respected. In pursuit of social acceptance and really, self-acceptance, I had completely forgotten how much had gone into me being who I was and how hard I had worked to become that person. Bella Baxter had the advantage of not having any reference for who she was "meant" to be. The friends she met on the boat and in France liked her for her uniqueness. It makes me very cognisant of the saying, "When you attempt to be like someone else, you're robbing the world of yourself." It's very true. So, while I would never advocate for complete isolation, I would say, try to process things on your own, without outside opinions or potential influences.

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