The conditioning that has caused you to fit into a box that says, this is what’s normal, this is what’s successful, this is what’s liked. I hear that mental chatter throughout a day, the feelings that hold up a red flag halting my mind to yell out, this doesn’t feel like me, why am I still working from this place of old programming? These ideas that society, peers, elders, even myself, have declared, this is the "correct" way to be. Plain and simple, because it feels difficult to let those old patterns in my mind die off, it's just so much easier to take the well treaded route that gives me reinforcement after reinforcement of why I should stay the same.
I wonder what it would feel like to never have had that box, no stipulations, shaming or labeling, to just understand that we are all so different, from the way we interact, the way we learn, the way we succeed, the way we fail, all of it, and that we were meant to be all these varying puzzle pieces that eventually fit together so perfectly to bring about this gigantic picture. Just last night I got together with some friends from high school, we reminisced on so many stories, and it was bewildering having someone recount a story and not remembering it at all, but we would piece together these adventures, each of us remembering some different part, and at the end it all culminated into a myriad of amazing memories, so much better than all of us just remembering the same one. What if we recognized the individuality of even our own minds to recollect and hold onto different pieces of our existence and took that licensing to embody who ever we truly felt to be, navigating life in the way that is meant for us, not how anyone else says it "should" be. So really those red flags or the times you say you "should" be doing something or being someone are wonderful moments to reassess where it's coming from, why am I doing this, is this who I choose to be? Let that ominous and uneasy feeling loosen its grip and actually give you an open space to step into whoever you feel you are in that moment, tread a new path and see where that takes you, but do it for you, no one else.