I want to proclaim what I would say others as their teacher, their wiser version of themselves, someone who’s experienced, who’s been where they are. But it’s not true. It can never be true, these broad strokes of supposed wisdom that others serve us. We are all different. We have different minds, different perspectives, different experiences that shape our soul. How can we possible shell out advice? How audacious can we be to think vague advice qualifies us as wise, all knowing, worth listening to. It continues to be my struggle. Sharing, especially when it comes to social media, typically means you have something to offer someone. Or at least, that’s how you gain clout, “followers.” What a label, followers. And that’s exactly what we do: we follow. We surrender our agency and outsource our decision making because we deem someone else more knowledgeable than we are on a subject. But one subject becomes two and what once was possibly harmless education is now the inability to consult our own knowledge, our own intuition, our own discernment, even our own ability to do our due diligence and cross reference sources to ensure the one we’ve chosen to “follow” is indeed the best and correct. What a joke. We fall further and further down these rabbit holes that create deeper and deeper fissures from ourselves. We become mindless followers who have lost the ability to stop for a moment and ask “what do I think?” And I get it. Society now has drained us. It keeps draining us. It keeps speeding up, stretching us thinner, leading us to believe we’re further and further from the people, places, things we truly want. Our energy is given to our demanding jobs that steal more and more from us every day. Our energy is given to our family, our friends, our wives, husbands, children, community. We’ve lost the ability to keep some for ourselves. Hell, now it’s considered selfish to do so unless you label it “self care,” which it is. But it doesn’t feel quite right that we have to label it for someone to accept a boundary we want to establish. So our energy is drained in one way or another and fuck if we want to spend any more of it trying to decide what we truly think about a subject or find the truth of a matter through our own research. No, we grab the hand of one of those we “follow” and we listen to them. We trust their judgment and place our faith in them. Those we “follow” carry the weight of us but they bear no responsibility when we finally learn that they’re wrong. We can kick and scream and make a fuss all we want but it will not change the fact that we did not choose wisely.
We cannot outsource what we believe. We cannot outsource the truth. We have to shed the opinions of others who may or may not have the full picture. We have to be discerning and take everything with a grain of salt because the truth is not straightforward and people choose to see what they want to see at times. We have to question different perspectives. We have to question ourselves. We’re all doing our best and we all deserve credit for that. But it is not a time to outsource our beliefs. It is never a time to outsource your beliefs.
moodybreadcrumbs 