IT’S ALL SOMEONE ELSE’S FAULT!

Every human arrives into a play that’s already written.  Like finding yourself in a Netflix series where the location, language, culture, traditions, beliefs, values, characters have already been fully scripted.

You arrive naked.  No costume, no script, no idea of what role you’re to play.  However, you quickly begin to pick up clues.

“It’s a boy!”  Or “Not another boy”!

“People like us do ….  People like us never do“!

“Clever little darling”

“You’re just like your mother!”

“Our family are all clever and talented”

People like us don’t go in for books or all that sissy stuff!”

So the new arrival copies and pastes a composite person they come to believe is ‘me’.

It may fit like an old tweed coat that’s been turned inside out and shrunk in a full rolling boil wash but hey - what do you do!

How many individuals find themselves edging crab-ways through the world hobbled by a limiting self-doubting, self-sabotaging, distorted character because “this is who I am!”.  No possible escape. They read their life, their possibilities, their limitations from a script that was generations old by the time they fell into the sitcom.

SECONDARY GAIN

Of course there are plusses.  “It’s all someone else’s fault!” is a great get out of jail card.  Because ‘me’ is a composite of all those other peoples stuff, I can’t be held responsible for the consequences of my choices and decisions now can I?  After all, can I even say with any certainty that they’re mine!

I’m only a bit part in the whole drama.  I’m a meaningless, fragmented nothing.  I don’t care what happens.  I’m a futile, helpless ripple in the space-time continuum, an accident that just happened

GROWING UP TIME!

The critical realisation that I’m not this assemblage of other people’s decisions;  the Eureka realisation that - wait - I’m still the I that arrived at the beginning, a complete person, with all my predispositions and potentials switched on ready to go, this discovery doesn’t happen for everyone.

If this Eureka moment does hit you the question is: so who am I?  What might I be if I actually took a moment to look at my world through my own eyes, stripped of the filters of other peoples beliefs, values, prejudices?

TALL STUFF.

If I’m not the me I always thought of as me, then who am I???

Tall stuff. And very scary. Many people choose to stick to the known, however horrible it may be, rather than contemplate the unknown.

Of course no one can actually remove themselves from the great thundering river of being.  We’re in it until we die, sink or swim.

What can change is the shift from being peripheral; the experience of thinking of myself as a helpless piece of flotsam tossed about by generational pressures and demands, to the ‘I’ at the centre of my own existence.

PASSIVE THINKING

“Experiences happen to me.”

ACTIVE THINKING

“I am the experiencer of my experiences."

DECISION

As with every real decision there is a cascade of consequences.

I must reclaim all ‘blame’.

To disown blame is to outsource my causality:  “They made me do it!” “It’s their fault” They caused … “

Blame hands over the strings of my causality – my power to make things happen, to the puppeteer - whatever perp. we see as limiting our lives by their behaviours.

The statement: It’s someone else’s fault” sees ‘me’ as being jerked and jiggled about at the will and whim of another.

Existential ‘I’ refuses to outsource causality, because your causality is your unique human power to make the changes you decide in your world.

PRICE TAG

The decision that you are no longer a bit part in someone else’s faulty script, but the author of the play of your own life comes with a price tag.

It’s no longer possible to hide behind the decision not to make a decision: the passive aggressive ‘I don’t mind’, when a decision needs to be made, forcing others to decide, and then being able to blame them for the outcome because after all “I didn’t do it!”