12/11
Balancing flow and thoroughness. I've been contemplating this a lot. Full go with the flow, let things come to me, I did that mostly for a long while. Discipline, structure, containers, being decisive, having boundaries, insisting on limits, trusting my perceptions, acknowledging myself as an individual, much less common for me. Because I haven't always known how to trust myself, I have often purposely left a lot of space for questioning my senses. Always suggesting I may be wrong.
This battle for right and wrong is insidious. It's the thing my mind has the hardest time grappling with these days. I go long enough not needing to talk in substance to anyone that finds my beliefs unbelievable.
I ran into this the other day with a friend. We were talking about sci-fi books and they were stating a part of this book that talks about aliens' interactions with earth early on in our history and I responded with, "well that's like pretty much what happened right?"
They responded with, "oh, do you believe in aliens ? I don't believe in aliens."
I quickly returned with, "well, I don't believe or not believe in them." I felt the tension dissipate.
"Oh yeah, same here." They said.
I texted this friend a few days later telling them I did believe in aliens and find it generally easier to just go the direction of, "what's belief anyway ?" vs. admitting I actually believe something.
This feels related to the poetry vs. essay form. Poetry is generally safer feeling to me because I can always just say there's multiple ways to interpret it, rather than saying outright something that may feel controversial to a person.
I've come to settle on some sort of foundation. It seems like my beliefs are informed by my personality, my inherent likes and dislikes, my innate preferences. My set of beliefs are unique to me, and outrageously, can be completely absurd/mental/wrong to someone else. I don't need to hold too tightly to beliefs because they may shift or morph depending on the content of my awareness and it's growth.
However, it's inaccurate to say that my human doesn't have things it believes in, even if it's also true I don't reeaalllyyy grasp the terms of that word, belief.
It's like picking a direction. I can avoid that immense pain of losing potentials by not picking anything. But I'm not really being true to myself that I do have particular areas of things I'm inevitably interested in anyway. And one way or another a path will be taken.
It's part of these writings. I really don't want to have to post in this sometimes seemingly cutthroat space, my beliefs that I know some other people don't agree with or value or see the truth in. It's seemingly much easier to just keep my beliefs and thoughts to myself as to not create ripples and have to deal with the conversations or non-conversations, misunderstandings, implications, etc. But I'm still having them. And they are still creating my world whether I speak them to you or not.
And so often I'm just listening to theirs and giving them space and just leaving me out, so it's more comfortable for them. Or me. It's really me. So it's more comfortable for me to not have to defend myself out loud. Or more likely internally, while I just sweep it over out loud with a nice, "well no, yeah, I'm neutral, I can see both sides, I'm too young to have opinions anyway, I'm just a little white girl, don't mind me" . . . I'll just listen to you and resent the world later for not getting me and always saying stuff that makes no sense to me.
Oof
