“Don’t trust any thought that makes you doubt yourself,” Dr. Claudia Thompson.  Any thought that takes us away from who we are is dangerous.  NEVER trust the thoughts that come up when we deny who we are.  That is when we start to feel lost because we start to believe things that at their very core aren’t true.  If we can’t discern the truth any longer then we need to stop and gather ourselves until we remember it again.  Over the last few weeks I’ve felt like I’ve been having a bit of an existential crisis—like I couldn’t remember what it was to even exist in a way.  I literally felt out of my mind then out of my body.  I couldn’t connect the two.  I didn’t know where my thoughts came from or how I remembered words, or what words are, like how am I typing this now? How do I know how to spell and work this machine?  How do I know how to throw a dart?  How do I know what I feel?  What is existence, really?  I couldn’t explain what was happening in my mind and body…at all.  And so much of this stems from things going on at work, the extreme stress I am under from an ongoing incident regarding my character involving my higher ups and an employee of mine After 20 years, I don’t understand how these things can even be in question and I never thought I would have to have that kind of fight.  It literally made me question who I am.

It’s one thing when we have outside influence pushing on us to be a certain way or trying to make us believe we are something we are not, but it is quite another when the outside questions enough that it makes us question who we are.  The second we have thoughts that make us doubt who we are, or that we don’t know what we are doing on any level, the foundation cracks.  This isn’t an ego thing like fighting to prove a point—this is about not letting people (including ourselves) derail us from what we know is true.  It gets scary when you can no longer connect mind to body and we lose sight of what we are doing here.  There were moments I wasn’t even sure what I was doing while grocery shopping.  How could I let people get to me that much?  Why does their opinion still matter to me?  And why is it painful enough, causing enough fear in me, that I’m losing the ability to function?  I realize this is what happens when you rely on the outside to tell us who we are rather than trusting our core knowledge.  It is also indicative of a society that demands people perform for them when they feel a certain way about someone—like we call them on their crap and suddenly they are the victim and every hears THEM, not you.  It’s unreal.

Knowing who we are is important for so many reasons.  It keeps us grounded because it is the foundation.  It guides us because our identity gives us values and beliefs. I’ve said it a million times—when we know who we are, we are less easily influenced by the outside and that includes doubt from other people.  In the beginning of this incident I wasn’t really phased that much—but it continued to escalate to include increasingly inflammatory things about my character and the fact that I even had to defend that sent me into a spiral.  That’s when the problem of existence came in—my whole world became about defending myself…again.  We can’t question who we are just because other people are having a bad day or a misunderstanding.  We can’t doubt ourselves because someone thinks a certain way about us.  We have no control over it.  I’ve long said the fact that we live in a society that allows us to accuse people of anything at any time (ie we can sue for anything) and we must prove our innocence is dangerous.  We believe stories over truth when the truth is painful or inconvenient.  We all make mistakes but that is no reason to believe we can’t try again or fix it—it is certainly no reason to doubt who we are.  I had to remind myself frequently that I know who I am.  If these people want to believe they can tell me who I am because they have before, that I will jump through hoops to prove something, they can believe that.  We never have to perform for people.  Once we remember who we are and stop letting people tell us, or let them derail us, we regain that foundation and begin again.