Whispering in the Language of my Demons.
How well do you know yourself? I ask, because the answer is more important to your happiness and success than just about anything else. Do you know your strengths, and do you know your weaknesses? Most importantly, do you know the demons that can drive you to distraction and destruction if you let them?
If you don’t, then you should.
I had an experience yesterday where I was able to recognize one of my distraction demons, and head it off before it got me sidetracked. It all began with a book that a patient brought me as a gift.
Just one small book, but the contents were whispering to one of my demons and begging it to come out and play. It wasn’t a bad book, quite the opposite, and for most people it wouldn’t be a problem.
But for me – oh it’s definitely an issue.
Because the book is a series of IQ puzzles – designed in such a way to see how smart your brain is, and then push you to get even smarter. If that doesn’t sound dangerous to you, that’s awesome, because the chances are that you don’t have this particular little demon that I do.
For me, that book represents a chance to do something that feels right, but which in reality is oh so wrong.
It’s a chance to see how good I am, which is exactly a language one of my demons speaks.
If you’ve read this work for any length of time, you know that I struggled as a child with self esteem, coming from a pretty dysfunctional childhood, and that I pretty much based all of my self esteem on the fact that I felt like I was smarter than most people…ok, well if we’re being totally honest here I thought I was the smartest person around. I was a kid – what can I say?
But balancing your whole self esteem based on something like that is not only wrong, it’s dangerous.
If your only value comes from being smart, what happens when you come across somebody smarter? If your only value comes from being stronger, what happens when you come across somebody stronger. If it’s money, there’s almost always somebody with more; if it’s beauty, that fades.
Truthfully, any time you decide that your value decides on a comparison with someone else, you’ve already lost, and you’ll continue to lose every single time, because you’re incorporating a lie into your truth, and that never works out well for anybody. Your value comes from somewhere quite different, and nobody else is involved.
You have value because you exist. That’s it. Anyone tells you anything different, they’re probably trying to sell you something.
So today, I decided that I wasn’t going to let this particular demon win. Oh I’ll still enjoy the book, but I’m going to read it, and work on the problems, simply for the love of learning, and the joy of figuring things out.
If, while I’m reading it, I get caught up in my ego demon, I’ll just gently set the book down, until I am humble enough to pick it up again.
I’ve learned how my demons whisper to me, and sometimes, just sometimes, I’m smart enough to stop listening when they do.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings