There is a silent and mounting price to being “nice”. I’m talking about the version of being nice that is at the expense of being fully, straightforwardly, breathtakingly honest.
The price compounds over time. It taxes us, silently reducing our belief in ourselves. It injects and then maintains (or even nurtures) dysfunction in our relationships. As time goes by, it calcifies. It becomes more difficult to remove. The failure of dishonesty begets more and more failure. The dishonesty becomes concretized. Embedded. And it becomes increasingly harder for us to face.
And yet that is what we have and what we must work with. There’s no amnesty. No ctrl-alt-delete. No reformatting the hard drive. And so we must work with what we already have. If we are to evolve, grow, heal, and integrate, anyways.
It is a movement so simple and yet so anxiety-provoking. The movement? Turn into the places that scare you. Face the failure. Your feelings of failure. Face the fear of the implications of addressing what has not been addressed for so long.
Why is this on my mind? I saw this just this week. In Lauren and in myself.