Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt totally misunderstood.  <Raises Hand>.  Raise your hand if you thought it was your fault and needed to make people understand you. <Raises Hand>.  We live in a judgy world that tells us we need to meet others expectations before our own, that we all have to live the same way to fall into the “normal” or “successful” categories.  Even the opportunities that fall outside the norm have their own set of rules and expectations.  We live with very real but often unspoken limitations and expectations on our lives.  We just aren’t told they are real in our mind.  Anyone can judge the external experience of others without knowing the background.  That’s easy.  It’s superficial and based on nothing more than what we see. There’s no foundation there, there’s no real understanding of what people have gone through.  So why do we allow those people who haven’t lived our story to dictate how we feel about ourselves?

Our first mistake is assuming we are all the same and that we all want to be the same.  That assumption removes the creativity and the knowing we are born with as soon as it hits our ears—and this is fed to us as normal.  Crushing the dream and the spirit starts as soon as we enter school because we are meant to conform to the prescribed standards of what success is.  No matter it’s about regurgitating information instead of creating, if we don’t answer a question correctly, we are wrong.  We never consider that we are judging people unfairly—or that we don’t need to judge them at all.. The truth is if we judge a fish by its ability to fly, it will always look like a failure, and if we tell it so, it will feel like a failure.  We’ve been judging fish by their ability to fly for far too long.  That doesn’t make them wrong, it makes them what they are and they are allowed to be what they are—they have no other choice.  So the matter is really about context and understanding what we are seeing.  And even further back, understanding whether or not our judgement is really necessary.

We’ve been talking a long time about the paradigm shifting and the systems breaking.  I’ve said it before that there was a time and place for the system but it NEVER worked for everyone, so that in itself should have been an indication that the system needed to break a long time ago.  So many of us still cling to it because it’s all we know.  But look at the world.  Look at how things are changing and how rapidly we are progressing into new territory.  Schools don’t work, healthcare doesn’t work, the economy as we knew it doesn’t work, the government certainly doesn’t work.  We’ve spent so much time corralling the people and making them fit in boxes that we never looked at breaking the damn box as a collective.  What happens when we remove the self-imposed barriers to the lives we’ve been trying to live?  No, I’m not talking anarchy and destruction, there is need for some type of order.  I’m talking about creating a system that is truly for the people, that supports the people and allows them to flourish.  Fish get to be fish, birds get to be birds and they are all allowed to be who they are AND to flourish.

It’s not so crazy.  I’m pretty confident in saying that we all feel the need to change the behavior anyway.  I look at 20 year olds now and the opportunities they are taking and creating for themselves, things that people nearing their 40’s or older wouldn’t consider because they are afraid.  There are absolutely ways to make the life you want, the life that fits and makes sense for you.  It doesn’t have to be like everyone else.  It’s a matter of simply going with it and deciding that the pain of being who you were is greater than the pain of becoming who you’re meant to be.  It’s time to spread those wings and leave behind the restrictions you felt were mandatory, leave behind the doubt.  Get comfortable in who you are and step forward.  The more we can show the world we are embracing who we are, the more the world learns to do the same for themselves.  It’s about spreading light and not darkness, it’s about removing limitation not creating a new box, it’s about loving ourselves enough to be who we are meant to be instead of berating ourselves for not being who we were told.  Small steps make a big impact and the more light we can spread to the world, the better it will be.