06. You have random, almost completely unprecedented bursts of anger over very small, unimportant things.
07. You complain constantly—about things that don’t even really warrant complaint. (It’s a subconscious desire for other people to see and acknowledge your pain.)
08. You’re indecisive. You don’t trust that your thoughts or opinions or choices will be “good” or “right” the first time, so you overthink.
09. You procrastinate, which is just another way to say you are fairly regularly in a state of “dis-ease” with yourself. (You can’t simply allow flow, which is a product of suppression.)
10. You’d rather feel superior to other people than connected to them.
11. When someone you know is successful, your immediate response it to pick out their faults rather than express admiration or acknowledgement.
12. Your relationships end for similar reasons, you feel anxiety over similar things, and even though you assume time will diminish these feelings or responses, the patterns persist.
13. You’re resentful of whomever you think is responsible for your pain, or your lack of success, or your inability to choose.
14. You feel as though you can’t really open your heart to someone.
15. You suffer a “spotlight complex,” in which you feel that everyone is watching you and is invested in how your life turns out. (They aren’t. They’re not.)
16. You’re afraid to move on, even though you want to. You may be ready to move on mentally, but until you completely process the accompanying feelings, you’ll remain exactly where you are.
16 Wenger, Daniel. “Suppressing the White Bears.” 1987. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 53. No. 1.
57
50 PEOPLE
on the most
LIBERATING
thought they’ve
EVER HAD
Your life unfolds in a succession of revelations.
It’s when you set down the book and stare ahead and repeat the sentence in your mind again and again, apply it to every little thing you twist to make applicable. You answer questions you didn’t know you were asking, tie ends you left off years ago.
The key to a completely liberating thought is that it’s self-evident. It’s proven itself in your experience. It doesn’t have to solve the problem; it has to help you understand why you had it in the first place.
Every conscious thought you have either circles you back into the mental cycle you’re in, or it liberates you from it.
Some cycles are healthy; some are not. Some you want to maintain; some you don’t. Some you want to change and you know you want to change them. Some you want to change and you don’t know you want to change them. Some you need to change and you don’t know how.
I think your life improves in direct proportion to how often you are put in situations in which you have no choice but to seek a greater truth. That is something I think. People who are comfortable don’t have to keep reading, or searching, or seeking. They don’t grow because they don’t have to. (A sad but important thing to know about humans is that they don’t change until not changing is the less comfortable option.)
I know that my success has been directly proportionate to my suffering.
That is something I know. That is the experience to which I have arrived at the aforementioned theory.
At this point, the most liberating thought I have ever had is that I would not change a thing. Everything in my life served a purpose, the darkest and
shittiest and terrible and most self-destructive among them. They all brought me here.
I was never crazy. I was the product of my circumstances. (That one took a long time to completely acknowledge.) But it’s true: I responded and reacted and behaved the way any normal, healthy, functioning person would and should.
I wasn’t supposed to be happy. Had I responded well or complacently, I would have ended up where I was headed. I would have lived the life other people imposed on me. I would have actually constituted for being mentally ill.
It was crucial that I didn’t have it together or consistently feel good.
I grew out of my suffering by being able to perceive what was wrong and uncomfortable, really without knowing any differently. How incredible is that? That we can know when something is wrong even if we aren’t entirely sure what the opposite would be?
There’s not a good thing in the world that was not built of a thousand tiny revolutions, and people are no exception. I wanted to compile a series of not only the most liberating thoughts—the revelations that have changed and shaped and created me—but also other people’s. Here, 49 strangers shared theirs (one is mine), in hopes that maybe some of them can be yours as well.
01. “I get to choose what I think about.”
02. “I don’t owe anybody an apology for disagreeing with them.”
03. “You can have everything you want, just not at the same time, and if you think that’s unfortunate, consider that if you had everything at once, you wouldn’t really experience or enjoy it completely.”
04. “You can choose your family. You can choose your religion. You can choose who you are every day and it doesn’t have to be the same person you were yesterday. You do not have to become only what other people are comfortable with or can understand.”
05. “My life does not define me, I define my life. This moment is not my life, this is a moment in my life.”
06. “Everything I perceive is a projection of who I am. If I want to change my life, I change myself.”
07. “I don’t have to accept anything. I don’t have to change everything.”