“When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you’ll be successful” – Dr. Eric Thomas
When you grow up, you have no idea that where you’re growing up, how you’re growing up and what you learn along the way are different in other places in your neighborhood, let alone the world. There is no imagination to think that big.
You also don’t know what successful is, and thus, success can be as simple as surviving the day in your city, or not getting picked on for wearing something you like but others think is weird, to feeling good because you didn’t get hit or yelled at by someone who was supposed to be caring for you.
You may even start to normalize the violence and abuse because, if you don’t know it’s different anywhere else, how will you know you’re being abused?
You probably won’t …
Not until someone you care for touches you in a way that is kind and sweet and you withdrawal from them by leaving the room with no explanation, or tell them what they’re doing is not what you like by yelling at them and making them feel terrible about their effort.
Maybe they just outright slap you, or hit you, or punch you, or kick you, or bite you, or, all of them.
The worst might be the slithery slime that smile in your face and use all the words you want to hear, all the while expressing their complete disdain for you in ways that leave you feeling like what you did was always a little short of what they wanted.
Maybe what they say is not what they want …
I can tell you I’ve been versions of all the people I speak about in my writing.
I have been abusive, mean and slimy (many others).
And I’ve been kind, uplifting and genuine (many others).
You are too …
The concept that you have a monstrous side is not new, we’ve seen it play out over the history of time and it is something you may want to seriously start understanding about yourself – meaning, the fact that you could do a lot of harm if left to your programmed devices.
Simply look at the atrocities of the Holocaust, Genocide in Rwanda and Apartheid in South Africa … go deeper if you wish, as those are simply solid jumping off points for looking at the capacity of humans to be destructive, heartless monsters.
And make no mistake, that trickles it’s way into family dynamics in a fashion so pervasive, as we said earlier, it’s like you wouldn’t even know anything was wrong until all hell breaks loose.
Or you suffocate to death …
Choked off from the very nurturing required to build a stable, productive future in life. The ability to work within a social hierarchy and self-regulate your ability to cope with the world is no small feat.
It’s why so many people don’t feel ok saying they’re not ok.
Nobody else showed them it could be any different, because they weren’t any different and certainly didn’t look for others who dared to be any different.
It’s all the same …
Which is easier, on the surface. Nobody wants to look at things or feel things that are uncomfortable because it does cause pain, and we’re not necessarily equipped to love handling pain, rather, we’re pretty averse to it.
I really believe that is why some of the most successful people can literally ‘not breathe’ longer than the others. They want to not be in pain so bad, they’ll stay in pain as long as it takes to succeed, and then they make pain their little toy and play with it, using the motivation from pain to fuel the next success.
It’s a sick game, but, way better than the alternative game of denying being human and suffering through life wanting more and not suffering more for it.
Poor kids …
When kids are born into suffering and not able to be kids where they can run and play and simply breathe in the imagination of life, it changes who they are and how they perceive the world.
Sometimes, that creates the greatest things the world has ever seen, like art, technology and innovation.
Other times, it creates the worst, like slavery, war and oppression.
Is the juice worth the squeeze?
At what cost does the world allow the ability to be a monster, become reality?
Is everyone just going to duck the problem until the problem forces them to duck more, putting their heads in their asses?
It would be nice if others could simply ‘breathe again’.
Starting there would … well, you know.
Why is that so hard? Please share with us below!