are you using false power to avoid the uncertainties of life?

“Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometimes what shows itself as an empowering belief system is actually detrimental to us in the long run.

I most often notice this when I consistently blame myself for everything that happens to me.

If I am the problem — then I can fix it.

This gives me a sense of control over my life and environment, but it leaves out a fundamental truth about life — uncertainty.

There are certain truths that would have been far too powerful to comprehend as children, and that are still very heavy even now.

Things like:
love and support can disappear for no reason
the adults in my life failed
my caregivers didn’t meet my needs and were not good enough

It’s easy to say these things, but to really feel them — to get to the bottom of them — is a terror that is incomprehensible to a child.

And because as children we are inherently narcissistic, it becomes even easier to take on the belief that we are at fault. Everything loops back to us. It all collapses inward, into our own internal world.

To avoid the terror of realizing this, we develop coping techniques that help us at the time — but are detrimental in the long run.

We do not allow space in our lives.

Everything has to be intellectualized and understood.
Everything has to be categorized, boiled down to behaviors and patterns.

There is no room for the creativity of life — for the uncertainty that life inevitably entails.

It is part of our brain’s mechanism to make sense of everything, to put everything in its “place” in the psyche. This gives us control. Control brings comfort.

But this is just a bargaining tool.

It is not true power, because it expels us from reality.

It is a way to avoid uncomfortable feelings — most obviously, the feeling of not knowing.

Not knowing can be incredibly anxiety-inducing. And if you are not comfortable with feeling uncomfortable, you will try to close the loop at all costs.

Often at the price of your own well-being.

You circle back to what did I do wrong and don’t allow for the possibility that others may have been wrong too.

You don’t allow the situation to exist objectively. You keep making it about who you are and what needs fixing.

In this way, you may never allow yourself to be truly loved — because this becomes your default way of relating.

Your confidence suffers.
Your self-respect suffers.
Your self-trust erodes.

You exclude yourself from the reality that other people affect you — and that you cannot fix everything.

This striving for perfection is futile anyway. There will always be something to improve.

Our nature as humans is to be open-ended. To go against uncertainty is to go against our own evolution.

It is not weakness to not know.

It is self-constraint — an over-intellectualization of life itself.

You lower yourself to keep connection, even when that connection costs you your self-worth.

You try to keep the world orderly through your lens, even if it costs you your dignity.

It is incredibly difficult to allow things to simply be — without choking them into understanding.

It is hard to tolerate certain behaviors without needing to know why we were treated that way.

I understand this deeply. I am living it.

I fight the urge to collapse into self-hatred and self-blame every single day — sometimes multiple times a day.

I keep searching for my own faults to maintain a sense of sanity.

When true sanity is knowing there is space around me.

I cannot exert myself onto others.
I cannot extract things from them.
I cannot control the flow of life or box it into certainty.

I am open-ended.

And it is this open-endedness that fuels my desire to grow.

But sometimes growth doesn’t look like effort — it looks like allowing emptiness.
Like finding gratitude for stillness, even when it defies logic.

We don’t need to understand everything.

Some things are better left as questions.

So I’ll leave you with this:

Are there situations — or parts of yourself — that you’ve thought about into exhaustion, without reaching new ground?

What if you let them breathe?

Even for a while.

Imagine what happens when you stop choking your darlings.

The curiosity and mystery of life are not as frightening as we think.

The monster isn’t uncertainty.

It’s inflexibility.