“The concept of “special” is based on anything we make an idol of-anything we perceive as better than others or ourselves. The ego has all kinds of ways of convincing us that people are special. When we perceive that someone is more special than others, we’re thinking with separation. We’ve forgotten that we are all one, and we’ve hooked back into the ego’s thought system of better-than and worse-than.” -Gabby Bernstein
A chapter in one of the books I’m reading, Spirit Junkie asks that you reflect on anyone or anything you have made special or an idol in your life. It’s a strange thing to think about at first because for me it’s been a natural part of my life. It is the way I have lived since I can remember and looking back I can see how I let those Idols pile on top of each other until I felt so small that I spent a good portion of my past feeling not so good about myself. It might also be something I didn’t want to admit to at first.
The obvious answer of where I’ve made people special is in my love life. I can remember my first crush in elementary school and always feeling so small around them, to being thirteen and falling hard for an eighteen year old who I had no business dating but felt like my world would fall apart when my parents tried to stop me, all the way through high school where I would turn a simple crush into an idol and dwell on it until the next one came along.
When I met the guy I would be married to for almost nine years it wasn’t any different, except this time he did the same thing to me and it was probably the unhealthiest relationship you could be in. We were both in lust not love with each other, I know we grew to love each other in some ways, but not what I now view to be real love. Our relationship was fully driven by fear and that is the opposite of love.
When you make a guy an idol you give all of your power away to that person and put your happiness in their hands. You become unauthentic and easily swayed in whatever direction you feel like you need to bend to keep them around. Which actually doesn’t even keep them around, it causes the opposite to happen and I have spent so much time giving my power to boys who didn’t deserve it.
But when I look deeper into my idols, I literally see them everywhere. Constant comparisons to others and feeling unworthy, all the way to those times I see myself as better than a person or a situation and make myself an idol.
I’ve done this with family, friends and people in general when I’ve felt like I’m not where they feel like I should be in life. Getting married young, starting a family even younger and not having a college degree but plenty of money problems has been a huge trigger to cause me to feel small and when I felt my marriage falling apart it got even worse. College, money, success, and status became my idols (that seemed impossible to attain at the time) and those around me, with those things sat on a pedestal above me that I couldn’t even reach if I was on my tip toes.
I spent my twenties as a stay at home mom, very disconnected from my friends, myself and feeling left out. Most twenty year olds live a pretty selfish life, at the time I thought this was a bad thing, though I know now it wasn’t and selfish is also another word for figuring out their own shit. But the truth is people without children have no way of knowing what it’s like to be a parent and how selfless you have to become once you are a parent (though I will say not all parents do this). Having children at twenty-one is like being put on a fast track to becoming an adult, you no longer only think about yourself first, your choices are determined on what is best for those little people you created. And while I was doing the mom/wife thing, my friends were doing what they wanted, when they wanted and put very little thought into how much planning it took for me to do anything outside of the home. I would get canceled on last minute. I wasn’t available to do things spur of the moment and didn’t have the money to just spend on myself. Although I now understand and realize it was never a personal things, it felt very personal at the time. The more this happened the smaller I felt and it caused me to feel very separate from others. This would also cause me to go in the reverse direction from that and be judgmental at times, to make myself not feel so bad and to make myself special. My ego would come in saying how much more I was learning or growing then those who weren’t doing what I was.
It is all relative though, I was just at a baby shower for a friend and I had this weird flash come over me… My life is coming full circle, all though I am still a mom, my life is completely different; I am going through what they were going through and they are starting to go through what I was going through. This is a cycle that will continue… hell I am young enough I could go through it all again! Nothing is more or better then something else. It’s all the same, it’s all equal, and we are all one.
