At work your boss is constantly riding you. At home, your spouse is constantly nagging you. Seems like everywhere you look, everyone is expecting too much from you.
It feels like you’re at the bottom of the pool and you’re about to drown.
You’re under a lot of pressure.
Truth be told, you wish it could be different, but it isn’t. You’re about to crack, and you need a way out before things start giving way.
It’s tough to do anything with all these obligations. Everyone you know has these expectations they put on you. Everyone you meet is silently judging how you’ve been slacking off lately, you can just feel it.
But what can you do?! You have to spend time with the family. You have to go to work! You have very real obligations to manage. Otherwise everything goes up in smoke without you.
But you’re finding it impossible to find some kind of work/life balance. Too much pressure from too many directions. The world is closing in on you, and nothing you’ve tried seems to make any difference.
What if you could find a way out? What would your life be like? What would it look like if you could magically get rid of the pressure everyone’s putting on you?
Here it is.
You want to do all that stuff you feel pressured to do.
That’s the short story. Here’s the long story.
Ever notice how often it’s the same government officials who are so hell-bent on “praying away the gay” and persecuting the LGBTQ community who are caught with their pants down in a gay scandal a couple years later?
What the hell is going on with that?
Well, he absolutely 100% denies that he has any homosexual urges. Not one. No sir, no how. Not now. Not ever.
But somebody around here wants some dude on dude loving, and that is absolutely repulsive. He can’t abide by that. How in the world would anybody want that? It’s unthinkable. It’s degrading. It’s the worst thing he could think of.
(And he thinks about it all the time.)
He simply refuses to even entertain the idea that he is the person who has these urges because it’s too upsetting. It’s not in alignment with his world view. It’s not who he’s told everyone else he is.
He is uncomfortable with his own natural, minor, unavoidable homosexual thoughts & desires, so he represses them. Like any temptation; the more vehemently it’s forbidden, the more enticing it becomes. It’s like the more you try to ignore it, the louder the siren sings.
Ignoring it doesn’t do any good. It doesn’t actually go away. Instead of recognizing his own desires, he perceives it as being out there. Soon he begins to feel a general feeling that “the gays” are out to get him.
What he’s really experiencing is his externalized self hatred as if it’s coming from anywhere other than where it actually lives; in him.
So what does all this have to do with the office? And your home life?
Everything, it turns out.
Any time you feel pressure from an external source to do something, you’re actually experiencing an internal desire to do that thing that you’ve lost touch with.
Remember this famous quote?
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
If you didn’t already feel inferior, their opinion of you wouldn’t matter.
If you truly didn’t want to do something, you wouldn’t feel the slightest pressure to do it. No matter how much the person asking you to do it wants you to do it, the amount of pressure you feel is only a measure of how much you want to do it.
It has zero correlation to the other person’s internal state. None. (You’re not a mind reader; there’s no way for you to know what they’re thinking, remember.)
It’s all you.
All that pressure at work? It’s your own desire to excel that you’re not in touch with. You might not admit it to yourself, (or anyone else) because you wouldn’t be able to guilt-trip people for all that work you do for so little thanks. You might be working to leverage all that hard work to a promotion, and you don’t want to appear too eager so you disassociate from your drive to win.
Maybe you just never fully realized what kind of incredible motivation you have to work hard.
Maybe you know how hard you have to work to keep the job, and you like the pay but can’t admit you’d stay in a situation like that for something as simple as the money.
Whatever the reason, the process stays the same: “I have to” is actually, “I want to.”
When you feel pressure to work hard, it’s simply because you want to work hard. When you feel pressure at home to do all these chores, it’s simply because you want to do all these chores.
So any time you feel pressure, ask yourself, “What about this situation is the thing I actually want?”
You’ll be amazed at the power you’ll find in admitting your desires. (Maybe not with others, to start, but certainly a good idea to try it with yourself.)
Instead of feeling like the world is out to get you, you’ll realize you’re angry with the world. Any of these experiences of pain from out there should be welcomed. Open your arms & your heart to these experiences because they are a beautiful gift of self discovery, growth, & opportunity for improvement.
Just like energy can neither be created nor destroyed; just translated, so too are your desires. Reclaim your energy by accepting all the parts of who you are, and suddenly the world is full of happiness & joy. (Not because anything out there changed, but you’ll now be seeing reflections of your own inner wholeness shining back at you everywhere you look instead of that part of yourself you couldn’t accept.)
Have other “out there” problems? Tell me about ‘em. I’d love to help you understand what the hell is going on, and help you reclaim all that energy you’re spending fighting what you can’t admit.
You’re a beautiful, multifaceted person who is a wealth of contradictions, logical & illogical desires, and that’s a wonderful thing to be.