Hey everyone!
I hope your week is filled with love and light, and more importantly, humility. This is a concept I’ve been thinking about quite a bit, so why not start a conversation here. I hear a lot in 12-step based recovery rooms that humility is required in order to recover. But honestly upon first glance, a lot of words look demeaning or intimidating until I truly look them up because alas, google is free.
I’ll tell you right now that when I came into recovery and began this journey, I didn’t think humility meant what it does. I thought…wow really? In order to recover, I need to be humiliated or humiliate myself? Don’t I feel humiliated enough by the shame and guilt riddled and tethered to how society perceives substance use and the struggle that comes with that as a whole?
The reality is that humility is a sister to the word humble. In a way, lessening your idea of your own importance. I know that for me, a side effect of struggling with substance abuse and the behaviors that came with it was a God complex. And I know you might now be thinking, what is a God complex, and do I have that? I’ll tell you what, I have experienced it, and many folks on their recovery journey have expressed a similar experience. A God complex is, in short, thinking and projecting into the world that you are the center of the universe, you know everything, and you are but a victim to this cruel world. Amongst many other things and I, myself have once thought that I was the most important thing in this living world.
The flipside of this is possible and more common too, where it’s the opposite of a God complex, you believe and project yourself to the world as next to nothing, that you don’t matter at all, and that no one or nothing was meant to make you happy. This is another description of low self-esteem. I have experienced both polarities in my active addiction struggles and on my recovery journey.
This might bring up the concept of nature vs nurture as well, but that’s another long topic that will have to be for a different day.
All I know is that for my recovery journey, I got to learn how to meet myself somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. There are many thought patterns that if I let go on for long enough, I could end up in the thinking pattern of one or the other. Through this journey of loving myself, and letting myself be loved by those around me, and loving those around me, I’ve come to my senses about a few things with the help of a stable support system.
Today I can wake up and believe that though this world is big, and there are over 8 billion individuals with lives as intricate and complicated as mine, emotions as intense as mine, and passions as big as mine… I am enough. I belong, maybe not in every crowd but in every space, I choose to take up, I am enough for that. Not only am I enough, but I am also worthy of love and light and my worth isn’t dependent on any societal norm or standard, I get to set those standards for myself. I am no better or worse than any other of the 8 billion humans I walk among. I am who I am, just as you are who you are and what a blessing it is that we get to be like no one else, and that no one else gets to be us?
My importance to this world does not stand only on what I can give, how beautiful the world sees me, or how the world sees me period. My importance rests among my passions, who I let love me, and who I love back fully, unapologetically, and unconditionally.