Maybe We Should Go Back

Fighting my nature in 2025

My spiritual beliefs are always changing, adapting, growing, and I do not presume to know the truth, but my current thoughts about life and death stand as such:

Our souls have been reincarnated again and again for millennia. With each incarnation, we choose our parents and the major struggles we will face before we ever live through them. The goal is to grow further in our spiritual journeys. Our spirit guides help us plan the life that we need to live this time around to learn the lesson we need or desire to learn. Between each lifetime (death) is a time of reflection, relaxation, recovery from the suffering of human existence, and learning from wise teachers the knowledge we will need for our next incarnation. This in-between place is similar to our world of dreams, in that time is irrelevant and your thoughts can manifest whatever you want to see (like the house you want to live in etc.). I think dreams are closely connected to death and that spirits can communicate with us easily in our dreams. I'm not sure what the connection is but sleep and dreams are perhaps meant to help us get comfortable with the idea of dying. There are actually many, many near death experiences and talks with mediums that support parts or all of this theory, and that's why I eventually settled on it. My beliefs will never be locked down and I welcome any new information I can learn, but I feel satisfied right now with my belief system.

With that in mind, I reflect a lot on what my soul must be trying to accomplish here in 2025. I picked a really shitty childhood, but there were good times, and it taught me about unconditional love. I'm not sure why I picked such a religiously psychotic family in particular, and the pain of deconstructing from all that was and is a lot, but maybe someday the purpose will be revealed. I picked an abusive relationship with a psycho. It taught me vigilance, self-sufficiency and how to recognize manipulation, gas lighting and victim blaming. Mostly, all of my biggest fights have taught me not to expect help or rely on others. Assume you are doing it alone, gather the strength you have within yourself and fight, and never accept surrender from yourself. Survive no matter what. If you lose the fight, fine, but go down fighting with some honor.

One thing I've been really trying to practice lately is having true love for others. Real, true love sometimes looks like harsh consequences. This is a huge struggle of mine and a major flaw in my character. I'm simply "too nice." I used to think this wasn't much of an issue, until I became a teacher. It makes my job infinitely more exhausting, frustrating and stressful than it should be or is for my colleagues. My weak classroom management has gotten me "talked to" and in trouble more times than I care to admit.

Now that I'm a mother, it's not just an issue at work anymore either. Now it's a major problem that colors everything I do and think. I constantly have to fight against my nature so I can effectively do my job and discipline my kids. Left to my own devices I will ignore a great deal of people's bad behavior and will put up with things I would never expect another human being to endure. Overlooking things, letting things go, forgiving easily, permissions given when permissions should not be given, being "chill"- I'm guilty of them all. And no, this is not a virtue. It's not a "sweet nature" as so many have told me throughout my life (especially in church!). The reason I have the problems I have is because for most of my life people told me this was a GOOD part of my personality! It absolutely is not. I can acknowledge pieces of it as being positive, maybe, but it needs to be fully controlled first.

This has been so hard for me. Gut wrenching at times. I hate listening to my kids cry when they're being punished. I hate having to dole out consequences to my students. I hate ruining people's days. I hate delivering bad news. I hate being the bad guy. I hate being "mean." I hate seeing people upset or crying. I will never be "the tough guy" in the room. Never. But there's no happiness or pride in being "the weak guy" either.

I've had to get a lot tougher with people and especially kids, and I'm still miles behind where I need to be in this area. It is a literal DAILY fight against my own nature, and it's fucking exhausting. I often feel like I'm not making any progress whatsoever.

I've spent time lately trying to figure out how this part of my personality was formed and why it has such a chokehold on me. The answer I've come to? Christianity and growing up in a fear-based environment. Christianity with its whole "turn the other cheek" mentality fostered my very toxic acceptance of unacceptable behavior at a young age. I wanted to please God and others, and it's sure easy to please people when you never call them out on their bullshit! This led to a lot of me "putting up" with shit behind the scenes while others walked all over and abused me. At the very least, I'm no longer in a place where I see this as being one of my virtues, so hey I guess that's progress right? But it doesn't make it easier to go against it. Combine this with my beliefs about survival and not expecting any help, and you get decades of me silently nursing my wounds in private and never letting another soul know the extent to which I've been harmed.

Another piece that I believe formed this part of me is that my feelings have been mostly invalidated throughout my life by stronger personalities. In the rare occurrence I would get up the nerve to confront someone about their bullshit, my feelings were blown off, invalidated, ridiculed or ignored at the very least. My parents did it, teachers and friends, romantic partners, church leaders, everyone! It's human nature to be defensive when confronted, and unfortunately it's MY nature to back down at the slightest pushback, so that's the cycle I've found myself trapped in over and over again.

Having to unlearn all of this is really hard. It was hard accepting that his huge facet of my personality is actually a detrimental weakness instead of something to be proud of. It's really shaken me and made me wonder what other parts of me that I think are good are actually destroying me. For now, I can only deal with one at a time, and this is the big one.