K. Banks

Change begins with the individual

You’re in the middle of a story. It’s a story about You, a person, living somewhere on a planet. You have a family…a mother, a father, perhaps they are living, perhap not; they may have raised you, or maybe not. You may have a spouse, or not. Some children, or not. You have a color of skin, and a color of hair, an ethnic background… You have ideas, opinions; and when you look in the mirror you recognize You.

But this is an illusion.

You have a body, a brain, and organs necessary for life here. Like an astronaut suit that enables you to function in space, you have a vessel that allows you to function here.

When you were new here, your story began. The empty brain learned the language, learned the data set for the environment you were in, learned that there were others, and distinguishable from others, you learned there was a You.

By the time you have reached the reading of this blog, you have a long established story of You. You know what you like, what you hate, what you want, what you don’t want, and a whole giant mess of stuff All About You!

But something is missing. You don’t feel good. You are angry, depressed, anxious, full of self-doubt, judgment, and intolerance for the world around you. You have a monologue in your brain about all the injustices of society, of people, of the world. Everything is wrong and no one understands. You have fabricated around you an identity of beliefs in the hope of insulating Your Self from those injustices; and everytime something makes you mad, you add to that fabrication, bigger and more elaborate walls to protect yourself, justify your hostility, and soothe all the discomfort you feel.

People build worlds out of all sorts of things: religions, beliefs, sexualities, identities, diagnoses, causes, colors, nationalities, genders, addictions, thrills… a lovely compilation of complexities to define an imagined Self. And you say: This is me! This is who I am! I am a feminist, thrill-seeking, Leo, who loves science and music, who attends protests, and doesn’t eat animal meat, my favorite color is green, I suffer from anxiety, but it’s cool, because, yay, Ativan!

And the more we build onto this story, the more separated we become. And the more separated we become, the more intolerant we become. And the more intolerant we become, the sicker we feel…

Until we find ourselves seeking a solution, something to fix it…to fix us. All too often, we make the mistake of just adding more layers to the walls: another med, another religion/belief, another drug, another drink, another person, another justification…

But the fix is not to add to the mess—the fix is to take away from the mess!

This is the PARADOX

There is no You. It is all a story. Everything is a story. Some stories we collectively agree upon, and some are personal, but no matter what, it’s all a story.

The You that you think is You, is at first a parental-generated, then a social-generated, then a self-generated avatar, a skin that you walk around and experience life in. Once you recognize the reality of this, you can release the stories you’ve been stuck with and decide to BE who you would like to be.

Of course there are some things that you cannot change. For instance, you cannot rewrite history. If you had terrible parents that did terrible things to you, you can’t change that, but you can change your perception of it. You do not need to be victimized by it. Victimization is a choice. Understand that the people who brought you into this world were just as subjected to stories as you are (sometimes worse than your own), they knew no better than you do, they were most likely just as broken, and you are just as capable of being exactly like them. In fact, at some point in your life, you probably have been exactly like them. Another paradox! (Before you reject this idea, think it through and be honest with yourself.)

No one is without a past, and history is more often than not, ugly. The point is, there is nothing that says you need to keep living those stories. Let them go. The only story that matters is the one you are living today.

And understand that undoing these stories takes time. It is habitual, after all, to think of yourself a certain way. Sometimes the story of yourself even becomes a badge of honor in some weird downtrodden way. You may find that you wear your pain like a suit of armor, letting it define you, you even tattoo it on your arm with pride. But if you have not already witnessed in this life, nothing is permanent, not you, not the “good”, not the “bad”, and certainly not the stories.

This life is a playground for consciousness–embrace it, enjoy it, do something fun with it. Don’t take it all so seriously, don’t take yourself or anyone else too seriously. It’s all good, it’s a beautiful life, and we are all in it together.

And once you free yourself, you can start to affect the world.

Be the change…