Day 27 – 5-3-2021 – Breakdowns Con’t: Fear and Judgement

Yesterday I walked through some things that showed me what I don’t want in my life anymore. It is my experience and belief that if we live in this moment in time, especially in the US, fear and judgement has become our national anthem; and that is so sad.

Most of us are brought up to think we aren’t good enough. This is a hot topic right now in the personal development world because of that. We are living our lives medicated in some way, whether from self-medication or prescribed.

We are anxious and depressed and don’t know how to get out of it and the meds certainly don’t help the underlying issue because most of us are also too scared to go inside and see the cause. We would rather cover it up with a band-aid; it feels safer that way.

I am finding out just how brave I really am. I’ve been told that on numerous occasions. Did I believe them? No way. I’m not good enough to be brave.

But wait…I discovered this thing about fear and judgement today.

I have been scared of everything pretty much my whole life. When I was younger, I physically hid in my closet and mentally hid in my “closet” too. No one liked me, my friends thought I was weird, I couldn’t fit in anywhere, and I certainly didn’t understand who I was in any of this. I always did what others wanted me to do and it never meshed with me.

My “poor abilities of learning” in school and always being a C student added, as I mentioned yesterday, to my feelings of not being good enough and those feelings of fear and judgement. Fear and judgment were huge for me because I’ve always wanted to be liked.

One day, I was eating lunch with my 13-year-old daughter, at the time, and she said something to me that was so profound, it never left me.

She was an AP student and was in a group after school once a week with other AP students. The teacher who led that group told them that sometimes in life you have to think outside the box. My daughter was wisdom through and through that day, in that room. She looked at the teacher and asked, “How can you think outside the box when you aren’t even in the box to begin with?”

What? That comment changed my life forever and taught me to look at myself in a whole different light. My fear of never fitting in and other people judging me were pushed in a different direction. In school and in life, the box is where most of us live. If we aren’t in the box, we are most certainly and desperately trying to get into it. But why?

Today, I got to experience some information that came across my path, that continued to shift my way of thinking about this. Ready?

School, at lease in the US, is set up to be a quick learn. It is not set up for kinesthetic learners. It moves too fast for that.

For example, from personal experience and a conversation with a 5^th grade math teacher just last week, the new kind of math they are teaching is hard to learn, no one can figure it out. I worked with kids in an afterschool program at a martial arts studio and I found out the hard way how they are teaching early math. The math teacher even said it was hard to understand, let alone teach it.

Anyway, in school the intention is to get students to memorize a lot of information so they can be tested to see how much they “know.” For college, for funding, for reasons other than what they need to be. It is not helpful to most kids who learn in the school systems, especially me.

For I am a kinesthetic learner and there are many children out there who are the same. We have to have things repeated because we want to know the ins and outs of everything. We want to understand. We want to connect on a deep level with everything.

We are not good enough students, kids, or people? False.

We are deep, feeling, knowing and purposeful who once we realize that our C’s in school came from a was of learning that we didn’t do, it only showed us that we have more to give and receive and weren’t in an environment conducive to that way of learning. We dimmed our light because we thought we were stupid. Now we get to shine!

I say all of that to remind us that when we feel like we aren’t good enough we also fear stepping into our greatness. I am walking that path. I have been so afraid of being judged as I had been throughout my life that I sabotage myself and keep myself for jumping so I can fly.

I feel now that this is possible, and I am still scared. Only this time, at this point of my journey, I have no choice but to face that fear, make that jump and soar. I can do this…