Weak and Cozy

I went downstairs the other day, and from my storage area in the garage, I pulled out a bin. It was the one labeled "incompetence". It's been a while since I left it there, and it's a shame. It brought back so many memories, and I realized that over time, instead of resolving my incompetence with competence, I subconsciously found ways to just avoid dealing with it. And I know that because not far from it, my "ignorance" bin was being used a lot more over the years.

I miss incompetence, not just as a reality, but as an admission. Feeling incompetent brings a lot more reality of life than feeling accomplished, and tossing items from the incompetence bin into the ignorance bin is what most of us eventually do. I guess it's sort of a biological coping mechanism, when your mind and soul can't deal with so much transformational pressure or pain from incompetence. You decide to act tough, you decide to get a thicker skin, an armor, made out of layers of ignorance and anything else you find in your emotional junkyard. But a thick skin only hides weaknesses; it does not make them disappear or evolve. Weak and cozy won't mean power, will it?

Navigating through pain, rather than blocking it, is something we miss out on a lot. I do it so often, and even as I write about it, I know I don't change much.

At some point, I used to even combine the two; I learned to create laughter from the right amounts of incompetence and ignorance. It worked for a while, until my mind's abstraction greed took over that too and replaced it with predictability, simply because it did not have the stamina of dealing with the unknown, the unpredictable. A new thick jacket, but this one made of logic, and a lot more numbing in return.

I'm over that stage now. Instead, I've adapted to accept who I am and respect how I was designed. You can't beat yourself up and push yourself nonstop; the mind shields against risk over time. It's inevitable, not to mention our bodies are here to constantly teach us the consequences otherwise. There's a balance somewhere for each of us, where you just have to say, " This is me, and I'm just going to smile my way from now on, unapologetically.