I guess you can say that I ‘souled out’

Back in January of this year, I was terrified. There was an impending doom that was not just following me, but completely embodying me and encompassing me everywhere that I went.

I was in a heavy, murky fog with very limited vision, but I had faith and a great circle of people around me carrying me through one of the scariest times of my life.

During this extremely volatile part of my existence, I had hope but it was still continuously drowned out by the unknown, fear of judgment, abandonment, and not knowing if my future was bright, or even there at all.

Still, I knew without a doubt that I had made the right decision to come forth with who I really am. But, it was still scary and I felt an overwhelming feeling of guilt and shame about it.

I started searching for articles, knowledge bases, and videos about dealing with guilt and shame. I had to overcome this somehow and shake the torturous feeling that was ruining my experience on earth.

I came across this video by someone named Dr. PHD where you make two columns. The first column is others’ guilt and shame that you’re carrying around. The second column is how you feel about each individual guilty and shameful situation.

This separates how we feel versus what we are allowing others’ feelings to impose on us.

I found out quickly when doing this exercise that I was carrying around the guilt and shame of other people. From my biological father’s very hurtful comments, publicly and privately, to what I had heard some so-called friends, acquaintances, politicians, some so-called family, the negative comments that I had heard about transgender people weren’t my personal views on the situation.

I quickly realized that personally I have no guilt or shame about who I am. I am actually proud of who I am, especially when it comes to facing the cold, hard truth about who I am, and what I overcame while I was trying everything I could to not face it.

In my soul, every human being is equal. In my soul, everybody gets a seat at the table, and in my soul, we all eat.

This exercise can go much further than just guilt and shame though. It can be used to determine how we feel about any situation and it goes right along with my core value number 2. “I listen to others’ views, but I don’t let them make decisions for me.”

Everybody has an opinion about something. In most cases, their opinions are based off of information which they were given and their conscious or unconscious minds either accepts or rejects the information, leaving behind an unwritten but very pronounced opinion that is inscribed in their mind.

The quick dissection and writing of information in the mind is then set as a marker of how to react whenever one is faced with that situation again, therefore instilling opinions. We all have millions of them about different situations.

What we usually don’t realize is that this bank of information comes at us so quickly while we are growing up, that we don’t have time to investigate every bit of information before writing our opinions in our minds and a lot of our opinions come from propaganda, marketing, traditions, life lessons, and so-on, but they aren’t ours.

We never took the time in a lot of cases to go through each one individually and rewrite our opinions to see how we truly feel about each situation.

And that is now what I’m doing. Before I speak my opinion about a situation, instead of regurgitating something that I heard once that may or may not make sense — instead of people pleasing — I’m going back through my memory bank and rewriting how I feel about the situation this time.

I’m not using a talking point or what other people have told me. I’m choosing to form my opinions about things based on how I truly feel.

The exercise is exactly the same as the guilt and shame exercise, but with opinions about situations.

What are others’ opinions? How do I truly feel about each situation?

Before you form an opinion about something, instead of just regurgitating something that you heard someone say about something or someone, go through and make sure that it aligns with your personal opinion.

How do you truly feel? The world has enough copy-cats. What we don’t have enough of, are people who are true to themselves and speak based off their own opinions.

So I guess in a sense, I really have “souled out.”

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