DEAR DEVIL

Who were you before you got hurt?

It is up to us to never forget who we truly are.

- Tamuna Tsertsvadze

So many of us today are carrying around something short of our real selves. We are walking about, engaging life and engaging people with a fake version of ourselves, or albeit, a version that was created out of experiences we have had in the past.

Rob Dial calls it the "conditional self." The self that we have created to protect ourselves from hurt, pain, betrayal that we have felt before.

This is who a whole lot of us have unconsciously become, and it is completely natural, but is it right? Is this going to help us become everything we hope to be? I really don't think so.

Look at this.

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It is our natural tendency to care for people, but we have cared for a lot of people and have been taken for granted as a result of that, so many times, and so we stop caring, and start looking out for ourselves. A devil is born.

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It is our built-in proclivity to be trusting, to have faith in people and expect the very best of them, and with that, joy comes, as we have left our hearts without too much barricades, but we have trusted a lot and have been deceived, lied to, betrayed over and over again, and so we stop trusting. Now, whoever we trust has to earn that trust. A devil is born.

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We used to have the inclination to love people, to show compassion and be kind to others, but a lot of people we loved didn't love us back, in fact, they continued to break us, batter our hearts so much that we began to believe that no one can truly love us the way we love, our compassion and kindness have been taken to mean weakness and softness, that we don't have 'teeth' to live life. And so we discover how to grow teeth, we grow it. We start to hurt other people before they get the chance to hurt us. A devil is born.

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Oh! How we loved ourselves when we were born! We never knew what it meant to be 'thin', or to be 'fat', or to be 'short', or too tall, or poor. We loved ourselves that way.

There was never any reason not to love ourselves. There was never any reason for lack of self confidence, or a low self esteem. This is our natural self.

Until we started learning from our environment that it is not cool to be fat, or flat, or short, or tall, and so we recline. Our self confidence drops, low self esteem sets in, we enter our shell, never to become what we were meant to be. A devil is born.

We don't realize that to be tall or short or fat or flat or small is nothing. What matters the most is how you interpret it.

There is a tribe in Eastern Africa that equates your beauty and allure to how big/fat you are. Do you think fat people over there would ever have any reason to lack confidence? You become a devil for nothing!

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We used to cherish punctuality. Haha! We would stick to time, because we believed that punctuality tells on our integrity. Yes. A person who cannot keep to time cannot be trusted to keep to his words. So we'd always come very early to events, or sometimes just right on time, only to find that we are always one hour earlier than others. So we start letting allowances. "The event wouldn't start early anyway." We join the bandwagon, and start coming at the same time as 'normal people.' Punctuality and Integrity out of the roof! A devil is born.

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The same with cutting corners. Using fake products after getting money for the original, stealing, snubbing, engaging in verbal and physical brawls, going to the far end and engaging in illegal activities. This is not us. This is not our natural self. We even pride ourselves in it, saying we have developed thick skin.

No. What we have done is chiseled ourselves, shaped ourselves into something we weren't made to become. Into something our environment made, something the conditions around us have created. Mostly unconsciously too! We have become a devil.

Dear Devil, who were you before you got hurt?

Aren't you interested in knowing? Who were you before you became accustomed to all the pain, anguish, betrayal, anger, distrust, low self esteem, fear, selfishness that you now know and live your life by? Who were you before you started carrying all of these mountains? Mountains that you were meant to climb!

You need to discover again, who your true, natural self is, and start, little by little, to shed off the skin of your conditional self. To shed off this devil that you have become. To stop carrying the mountain that you were only meant to climb.

It is only when you stop carrying these mountains that you become light enough to breeze through life, into what you really should become.

Now, we are all just a bunch of folks that have been fashioned by our experiences, our hurts, pain, depression, and we have become almost the exact opposite of our true selves.

We need to come back. Only then can we grow into the shining light to this world that we were made to become. And we must start by asking this simple question:

"Who was I before I got hurt?"

To your growth,

Your Coach,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired.