Your sufferings aren't your only identity!

hen a baby completes its time in the womb and is ready to step into the world, the umbilical cord is cut off. This makes it an individual entity, no longer attached to another individual through a cord.

Most of us, even in our adulthood are still tangled in a cord. The cord of comfort that keeps us wrapped around our traumas. The trauma that we sometimes use to feel better about ourselves. We stress too much on the feeling of being a survivor of the cruelty done by people who had power over us.

Not demeaning the severity of the suffering, but we need to realize an alarming fact. Even after the actual suffering is long over most of us keep wasting precious years of our lives reliving the trauma in our minds. We make our sufferings our only identity.

Just like the cows ruminate - they swallow, un-swallow, re-chew, and re-swallow their food. In the same way, we keep chewing our cud, wallowing in every incident that affected us deeply.

We recreate those situations in our alternate world. We change the scenes, the script, and give it the righteous ending that is fair in our versions. We paint most characters in those situations as malicious, selfish, and unfair. And keep ourselves on a pedestal defining us as heroes for going through pain and surviving it. It is high time we detract from this perspective about ourselves.

Why are we better people? Just because we were too weak to stop others mistreating us? Or we were too weak and incompetent to make decisions confidently and avoid getting ourselves into trouble? Or we were too weak and petrified to leave those situations and cut on our sufferings? Or we were too weak and unmotivated to let go of the pain and do better things with our lives. Or we were too weak and stupid to realize that the pain is over and we finally have the life we always desired for?

We weren't better people just because we suffered and survived. We were weak people and that is why we suffered and had to survive.

Did we have a choice? No! Would we prefer to suffer if we had a choice? No! As the matter of fact, we did have a choice but we were too weak to practice that choice! And so we had no other choice than to suffer!

For decades, people face multiple tragedies, betrayals, and cruelties. But the biggest tragedy is being stuck in those tragedies and wearing them as a crown of glory. Devaluing our real achievements. Yes, we rather focus on our actual achievements and be proud of ourselves for that.

The reason we still consider survival as our biggest achievement is because we are aware that we are not doing what needs to be done with our lives. We are not attaining the optimum level of our potential. We are constantly reminded of that and so we compensate it by pushing forward our default survivor badge! Remember our sufferings should not be our ONLY identity!

“Hold yourself back, or heal yourself back together. You decide.” ― Brittany Burgunder

Years of wallowing in sorrow, self-pity, and blaming people got me to the realization that I am in a constant state of self-loathing.

Maybe in our subconscious, we regret a lot of our past decisions. Maybe we feel guilty for putting ourselves through all the troubles. Maybe we blame ourselves for whatever happened to us. But we don't want to accept that.

So when people do the slightest of wrong things we unintentionally make the biggest deal out of it. We adopt this defense mechanism as a tool to keep feeling better about ourselves. We falsely confirm that it's only the other people that are wrong, cruel, unfair, and deceitful. Whereas it's actually we who are weak, unambitious, and too codependent on people to feel happy and content.

We need to take it upon ourselves to correct this mentality. We need to sit with ourselves and our demons. Face them, have a discussion, negotiate and ask them to resign!

We need to detach ourselves from every person, from whom we have valid and invalid expectations that were never fulfilled. Detach ourselves from things that are supposed to be given to us but don't really belong to us. In the end, even if it's our right, or we have earned it we will only get what is meant for us. Be it people or things.

Stop using the trauma as a comforter to cover yourself from reality, cocooning in a womb of pain and refusing to step out in the real world! Stop clinging to pain just because you have nothing better to do with your life. Cut the comfort cord, detach and become the individual entity that you are supposed to be!

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