Fire or Fear

I'd like to begin this post by declaring myself the true champion of the Procrastination Games. Thank you, thank you - I am not proud. Sorry! 

Now onto the new post - today I will be writing about Authenticity. 

A quick Goodle search will tell you that the word “authenticity” means to be authentic. Why, thank you, Google, that’s exactly as profound and comprehensive a definition as I was hoping to find. Not one to accept defeat easily, and after a quick brainstorming session, I discovered that the definition of “authentic” is “to be honest or real”.

Ah, real…a word thrown around so aggressively these days. Often in order to put something or someone else down so that everybody else can know that the user of the word is in possession of a lot of depth and character. Or simply to hide behind social justice while actively disenfranchising everybody else because #insecurities. You can easily identify these people because they’re always going on about real music and real women and real whatever else, forever damning everything outside their definition of real to the realm eternal non-existence.

But I digress…

What I am interested in is my decision to dedicate the rest of my 2016 to the pursuit of authenticity, aka the pursuit of complete and total honesty in my dreams and intentions. I want to make choices that are true to who I am as person, what I believe in and what I stand for. I want to like the things I like because I like them; I want to do things because I want to do them; and I want to say things because I mean them.

So, in order to be as authentic as possible, I have created The Manifesto on Being Authentic.

This list could easily be ten times longer, but ultimately, my pursuit of authenticity will depend on my ability to be unapologetically myself. 

Darker Side by Rhodes

I was listening to Darker Side by Rhodes when I started thinking about what the song means. The obvious conclusion is that it is a love song about loving someone and all the worst parts of them. But I like to think of it as a kind of self-love song. “Oh, my darker side/ I’ll find your light/ I know you better than them”. My thinking is that at the end of the day, nobody knows you like you know yourself and I don’t think that anybody will ever understand the darkest parts of you better than you can yourself. 

So it is up to us to find the light, to look at the darkness and deal with it and try to heal it. In a bid to love ourselves, I think many of us think that the only way to do that is to celebrate the good parts and neglect the bad parts – treating them like they do not exist. However, I think the point of loving yourself is to love yourself completely, warts and all. By sending love to the parts of ourselves we like least we may transform them into something better. We can nurture the ugly parts so that we can grow beyond them, so that they can become less ugly and so that they can learn to take in some light.

If we keep being hard on ourselves for how jealous, petty, unforgiving and whatever other negative words we ascribe to ourselves, we can only add to the negativity and make it worse and ourselves more bitter. But I reckon if we can love our entire selves more completely, we can shed enough light on the ugly parts so that they are not so ugly anymore. These parts may always be with us but because we will have chosen self-love over self-loathing, they will be stripped of their power and they may blossom into something good. That jealousy will turn into appreciation and that lack of forgiveness will turn into empathy. Like weeds we cannot completely get rid of, they will bloom into a forest of flowers on the side of the road that contribute to the scenery on the journey we are on. Maybe not in the way that was anticipated but maybe in the way that it was intended. My point is that nothing and no one is perfect but denying the bad parts to make is seem that way, will not make it so.

I realise that this post is probably riddled with mixed metaphors but I hope you can understand what I was trying to say.

M

x

Darker Side by Rhodes

I was scrolling through the list of song titles on my iPod in search of a name for my blog when I came across Fire/Fear by The Head and the Heart. At the time I chose it because it’s catchy and convenient but at the stage I’m at in my life, I can’t think of a more fitting title for my blog. To me, Fire or Fear, means the difference between choosing do to the things I am passionate about regardless of the fact that I may fail, and being too afraid to do the things that I am passionate about because I might fail. “Fire” means that I don’t put my dreams on the backburner so that I can pursue a safe path in life that will likely be filled with a lot of compromise and a lot of regret at a later stage in my life.

This is something that I’ve been talking about a lot lately with the people around me – pretty understandable since I’m coming to the end of my final year at university and applying for jobs and trying to figure out the general direction my life. I keep repeating that I don’t want to start making compromises now because I’m terrified that that will become the theme of the rest life; choosing the easier path instead of the path that’s riskier but probably where my dreams are located. And I’ve also realised that it’s not enough for me to do work for the money.

Of course, nothing that I’ve written up to this point is remotely new or extraordinary, seeing as just about every third person pretty much shares the same ideas (I assume, I haven’t asked). The thing is, I haven’t created this blog for everyone else, I’ve created it for me. I’ve created it to challenge myself, to force myself to put myself out there irrespective of what people might think of me. And I created it to hold myself accountable for whether I chose fire or I chose fear during the course of my life.

So, I invite you to join me of this journey, my journey, as I regularly update this blog with my passions, interests, curiosities, discoveries and adventures. And I sincerely hope that there will be plenty of adventures for me to share with you and that you will enjoy what I have to share.

Here’s to choosing fire over fear.

M.