Who Are You When You're Not You?
The Two Wolves: handling the war between both sides of the Self.
When was the last time you spoke to yourself?
And when I say ‘yourself’, I mean your rational self.
Can you tell the difference?
Between the animated and emotional…
The version of you that berates you, tells you what’s right and wrong, tells you you’re not worthy yet or that tells you what you deserve or don’t
And the other who’s actually rooting for you.
The higher self that steps away from your emotions. The version of you that asks you for effort, dismisses assumptions and bitterness, calms your feelings, and tells you what’s most important.
Do you here it?
I grew up scolding myself.
Do I know when it started? Not really.
But the inner voice of human consciousness is not just a powerful thing, but something that grows with you from childhood on.
It tells you stories about yourself before you have any idea of its effect on you.
If you’ve ever heard of the parable created in Native American culture about the “Light and Dark Wolf” or the “Good and Evil Wolf”, then you understand that among all of the choices we make each day, is a constant living out of that exact story.
The war between you and you.
…
My father was hard on me.
Growing up, I was a tiny little empty bucket in which for him to toss his emotional baggage. Not in the way that he vented to me about things I couldn’t understand, but by dumping his anger and stress and doubts about life into me through my mistakes and childishness(you know, the kind that we all have because, well…we’re children). My obsession with forethought to avoid mistakes was born from that.
My stepfather wasn’t even better.
And I had both of these men in my life at once. I was alone, visiting with my biological father in the summer, then back home with my mother and stepfather for the rest of the year.
It wasn’t that I had a highly abusive childhood. I’ve seen the reality of truth through the emotional wreckage that was a bitter adolescent’s perception.
I wasn’t beaten but I was belted. I wasn’t told I was a failure, but I was screamed at for my mistakes.
Hardly abusive.
But why was I so susceptible? How come this hindered me rather than make me resilient?
Is it genetics?
Is it a unique character?
Is it because I was just held under the faucet of two emotionally volatile men, with no way to reach any air of understanding and reality?
Who knows…
…
For whatever reason, the voice we have in which we bargain with, collaborate with, and win over or lose to every day, is something we all have to face.
That is our consciousness.
This…battle between the drive to live epically and the fear of darkness that keeps us from it.
It’s the battle between the good and bad wolves.
But here’s the catch:
Those worlds have a relationship.
A symbiotic one.
And what keeps us from making the best of our lives is this idea that we can cut the chains from the dark entity that is our fear, doubt, and bitterness.
We think we can live without it. Disgard it. Exile it.
Yet, what you’re actually doing is freeing the contrasting energy of goodness that keeps you sane.
And even hough it sounds relieving, you’re not letting the dark wolf go, never to see it again…you’re unleashing it into the unknown whee it can wait you out. Where it can come from the edges of your known world and strike you down while you’re not looking.
It’s not that we need to kill the bad wolf.
We need to respect it. Acknowledge it.
We need to endure it when it tries to consume us…and even more importantly, unleash it when it can aid us.
…
What if you were to look at your character directly and honestly?
What if you were to come to an understanding that the human condition has nothing to do with eradicating sin and bad intentions, but to use both the light and dark of who you are to make the best of this one life?
This is the greatest misconception of living that everyone tends to(me too) get wrong.
And when we live our lives trying to be perfect, trying to not stir the waters, trying to only be good, trying to make sure everyone sees us in a good light — a white knight, a noble leader, an angelic entity of god-like existence — we end up trying to become something not only inauthentic but impossible.
Your greatest heroes and heroines have done bad things. Maybe some less than others. The proof of that is that it’s not our purity that makes us strong, but our mistakes, our irrational explosions, and all the dark things we can’t take back.
Every crevice, hole, and shadow holds the dark side of history.
There’s never been a predator without prey. No life without death. No expansion without suffocation. No growth without sacrifice.
So it goes the same with you.
You have to embrace the good and evil in you.
That’s what makes you.
That’s what makes you interesting, and even more importantly, full of potential.
…
By whatever flaw that exists in the human mind, our tendency to do great and intentionally pure things for the world tends to be our default.
We want to save ourselves and the world. And it’s a flaw because we create a theory and a belief that utopia exists.
We think we can abolish the devil.
Until he comes from the depths and eats your intentions.
In the end, it’s our job to make use of our darkness.
Our anger can move us to face bad things and bad people.
Our jealousy can move us to commit more deeply to our own growth.
Our sadness can teach us love and empathy.
Our resentment can even teach us compassion.
And we can rationally control that inner conversation with ourselves and that other emotional motherfucker.
We don’t need to silence him/her.
We need to control them. Consider them. And use their power.
That leads us to our best.
The inclusion of all of the self, not the uneven farce of purity.
Take note of yourself.
Seek wisdom from all of you.
Both wolves.
Truth and Love, Reader.
…