04/12/2025

I've been thinking a lot this week about power. 
About personal power, about global power, about the universal power above us all.

I don't want to tell you to believe in yourself.
I don't want to write about how self-love is the cure to powerlessness.
Those writings exist.

I am a skeptic. I do believe in a God, a universal consciousness of some sort. 
Though I don't want to name it or ascribe to an ideology that explains it.
It feels too small, too make-believe to me.

I don't think I am alone in feeling this way-
our world has been shifting away from dogmatic explanations of God for some time now.
And while I do see some problems that creates, I also see the freedom it provides to discover your own truths about what is above and within. 

While thinking about my own personal power,
I noted something that stood out to me-
that there is a distinct difference between feeling powerful and being powerful.
Sometimes, I feel elated, I experience a high. Something comes together in just the right way at just the right time and my belief in myself is renewed.
But this is always temporary. A fleeting moment of feeling.
And because of its inconsistency, it reveals to me that that must not be power.
Or at least not the kind of personal power I am in search of.
The kind that stays, the immovable truth lodged between my shoulders at the very center of me holding it altogether.

I have my truths, but do I act on them most of the time?
And when I don't, why don't I?

I imagined myself talking to others,
the me I am when I am interacting with my world.
And I had this sort of vision of myself,
there was me, the one self I am- the truth in-between my shoulders.
But there was also many other selves, all saying versions of my truth but not the entire truth.

They were parts of myself that I had edited, shaped into smaller versions- more palpable, bite size.
And these were the versions of me that I used to interact with others through.
Not because I was a fake or suffering from some disorder. 
But because somewhere along the way I learned how to be pleasing.
How to make another feel good while interacting with me.
I learned the parts of my bigger truth to withhold, the parts that were too intense or too unnerving, or just simply too vast and complex.
And I kept them safely in the center of me, just for me.

I gave to others only the soft parts. 
The mushy filling on my sides. The sweet parts that left them feeling like they just ate a treat. 
It wasn't about them. It wasn't that I didn't want to reveal my whole self to them.
In fact, that's what I craved more than anything in every interaction.

It was that along my path I had received the message that it wasn't safe.
I wasn't editing myself because I had ill intentions. 
I was editing myself as an act of self protection. 
My intentions were good. I was caring for myself, trying to keep myself from hurt and rejection. 

I've found over and over that our self sabotaging tendencies seem to always be coming from a good place. 
We mean well. We just want to make a world for ourselves to exist in that is safe. 
That's the fundamental filter of all our perceptions- real or imagined. 

But I also knew now, that to release myself from living in just part,
meant that I would have to at times be unpleasant.
That to be true requires courage.
Not because your truth is so appalling,
but because it might contradict how others have come to know you so far.
To show the whole after only showing part can be shocking.
Maybe even unto yourself.

Initially, it might be easier to portion yourself into smaller pieces.
But over time the weight of the bigger self never being expressed can grow heavy.
And the fear of being seen is real too.
But what I do know, when I'm alone with myself, 
is that whole being, the vast and complex one-
the one encompassing all the others,
is the most beautiful version of myself.

It's more kind and compassionate,
its complexity is mysterious and intriguing. 
Its desire to express its truth is noble and pure.
And its love for others reaches far deeper and wider than a single part can.

I don't know exactly how to integrate the parts back to the whole, 
but I think beginning to show them compassion and understanding for why they exist in the first place is a great start.