BY SENAIT G/HIWOT
Our conditioning begins from birth. You will get validation if you become what people want, not yourself. If you are your true self you won’t be accepted.
We are not our pretentious selves though; we are our animalistic human selves. By animalistic I mean not always happy and accepting but also fearful and ashamed. We are not always kind and forgiving but hateful and envious.
Living in the society you will be praised for some of these parts but denied for the other until conflicts burst out and take an ugly turn, just because they weren’t expressed to begin with.
Living with an amputated behavior society becomes unhappy and living with different mental health issues. Society by itself is judgmental and staggers itself of growth. If someone has a different behavior from his peers he will get bullied for it. His innocence will be up for mockery and he will be ashamed of himself even though he did nothing wrong. If someone doesn’t follow the mob thinking then his ideas are wrong.
Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the great philosophers of the 19th century spent most of his productive time in solitude and he has managed to shape our modern thinking… so is being an individualistic thinker worth it or not?
When our society appreciates people for who they are instead of who they are supposed to be their will be growth in every aspect in the society. People will feel welcomed and at home and their positive attributes will develop more.
I am not saying being evil is good but being human is good. Do you see animals always loving each other, you see them fighting too. Humans can also do the same and they shouldn’t be judged for it. We have a box of what qualities we should have and we drive ourselves crazy to be it. We put on a façade in an attempt to please others and deny our screaming inner selves. When we become our selves we’ll definitely be judged… so how can we be happy?
Most of our society’s questions today has become how can I be happy, how can I manage depression, how can I find meaning in life… all these stem from not being our true selves.
Life becomes unenjoyably because of all the standards we put on ourselves. I agree with the statement that says God accepts you for who you truly are because he knows a human that is fully accepted will never be bad.
We are told to accept our selves flawed and all but how can we do that when the society doesn’t? We live in a society where people are shamed for being fat when they should be accepted…
People with mental illness are judged for being different and so their condition is hidden until they find themselves isolated and prone to suicide. These all stem from not accepting our flawed parts and always trying to be perfect.
Perfection makes life boring. Learning from each other in an attempt to grow is what makes life interesting. When we accept each other for who we are and we look for our similarities instead of our differences we grow and change for the better.
When we deny ourselves in order to be perfect our imperfection becomes our suffering. We start to talk alone trying to figure out if we were right or wrong. We shouldn’t place ourselves in that condition in the first place. We only do that because we judge others who we think are wrong. Gary Zukav a famous spiritual teacher says “when you judge others you will do the same to yourself. We judge others in an attempt to feel better about ourselves but we will have the same level of acceptance to our selve
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD FRIDAY 27 JANUARY 2023
