Stop explaining yourself to people
Whenever you feel the need to explain yourself to people, you open the door for them to feel justified in nitpicking all your decisions. And the more that you allow people — regardless of who they are — to nitpick everything you do, the less trust you’ll put in your own decision-making abilities, and the more trust you’ll put in the opinions of others. And how can you truly live your own life, if you have a bunch of different voices in your head telling you what to do?
When you constantly need people to know everything you’re doing and crowdsource whether or not your ideas are good, you also make it easier for people to manipulate you and control your life. You position yourself as someone who lacks confidence and who cannot trust their own inner guidance. Generally, these people end up living the lives that other people want for them, not the lives they want for themselves. They tend to be crippled by their own anxieties and fears, telling themselves that they’re being responsible by not rustling too many feathers when in reality, that’s just an excuse… Are you one of these people?
I realized something lately: there’s really no need for me to be constantly updating my social media. Not that I’m someone who updates it on a daily basis, but when I’d do “big things”, I found myself wanting to shout out to the world what I was doing. I think the nature of social media makes people want to generally do that, but that doesn’t mean that it’s healthy. That very nature of social media leads people to live superficial lives for the purpose of external validation. By doing so, it helps people to feed their egos, rather than their spirits. They get caught up in a loop where maybe they don’t even care that much to do the things that they’re doing, but because their ego is constantly getting stroked, they keep it up, slowly eroding away at their own soul, till one day, they crack in a MAJOR way.
The spirit is the opposite of the ego; it just wants to be. It doesn’t care what people think about it, or if it’s following the path that society has laid out for it. It is ever-expanding and constantly wanting to express itself more fully from a place of pure, infinite love. It knows that whatever it does and wherever it goes, it is always loved. Spirit doesn’t lead an individual to post on social media for external validation, but instead because it likes something and wants to share it (as an example). Spirit lives in the now and is not harping on the choices it made yesterday. It knows that the only moment it has IS now, therefore it’s best to use its own intuition to make the right decision. No council is necessary.
I think you get to a point in your journey — if you’re doing the inner work — where it no longer phases you when people try to impart their own personal beliefs about the world onto you. You come to this understanding that people are who they are because of their own experiences, and nothing in this world can change them unless they decide to change for themselves. Sometimes it takes a tragic experience for them to make a change, other times they never change. Regardless, it’s not our job to change people, so why care about what they think, when they filter everything that’s going on in anyone’s life through their own perceptions?
At this point, I’ve given up trying to explain myself to people. All that matters is that I understand myself and that I understand that everything I’m going through is meant to teach me something about myself and the world around me, and you should too. Or not. The choice is ultimately up to you. Trust that whatever decisions you’re making-if they’re coming from an authentic place-are being made for a reason, and it’s okay if you don’t necessarily understand at that moment why you may have made them. If you dig deep enough, your spirit will provide you with the answers that outsiders could never give you. You must just have the courage to buck convention and do you.
Don’t be fooled: external validation is a trap.
Originally published at https://cultured.substack.com.
