For When Everything Is Burning

by Scott Eilers

Can you remember your last moment of genuine joy? Unbridled excitement? Lasting pride? Unquestioned belonging? How long ago was it? Did the feeling last, or did it slip away almost as quickly as you noticed it? Did you genuinely feel it, or was it more of a thought, a mental acknowledgment that you’d experienced a moment that should have produced that feeling?

At some point, you become the voice. The judgment, intolerance, and misunderstanding that once came from outside of you start to echo within. When this happens you retreat further inward, searching desperately for a sanctuary from the pain.

You repeat the messages you've heard, replay the patterns other people programmed into you.

Bury yourself as far down as you can manage to dig. Do it to protect yourself from everyone else. Do it so that you stop inconveniencing others. Do it because you shouldn’t be this way. Do it because you’re too much. Do it because the world is right and you’re wrong. Do it because you’re an anomaly, a statistical outlier.

So here you are. You listened to what you were told, took in the feedback. You did what they asked; hid the parts of yourself that they criticized and exaggerated the traits that they praised. You don’t celebrate your victories anymore, because that’s arrogant. You don’t voice your wants or needs anymore, because that’s rude. You don’t take care of yourself anymore, because that’s selfish. You’ve followed the path that was worn for you, listened to the wisdom of your teachers and caretakers. Now I have an important question I need to ask you.

If you’re living this way, constantly monitoring and modifying yourself for the benefit of other people, you are actively dying. Buried alive and dying a slow, suffocating death.

finally be accepted, to be truly happy. I didn’t find happiness. I found an escape from most of the pain, but what replaced it was worse. It was nothing. An absolute emptiness I didn’t know existed. I wasn’t there anymore. I couldn’t find myself, couldn’t feel a thing. It was cognitive and emotional nonexistence, a life more terrifying than any of the intrusive death scenarios my mind liked to randomly insert into ordinary experiences.

ever, but this time I wanted them to be there. Accepting them and welcoming them made for a much different experience than resenting and rejecting them. I realized I would trade the numbness for my full range of feelings any day, even during the lowest of my lows.

Excavate yourself. Dig down once again and find everything that you buried. Keep going until you find every piece. Pull them out, one by one, and gather them back up.

Love yourself like you did when you were an infant. Let the tears come when you feel them hiding behind your eyes. Give a voice to your needs, your wants, and your disappointments once more. Grant yourself every ounce of understanding, empathy, compassion, patience, and context that you typically reserve for other people. Show up for yourself the way nobody else ever has.

If you don’t accept this truth about yourself, that you’re a unique and distinct being who will never fully make sense to anyone else, your entire life can turn into a search for things you’ll never find here. Total acceptance. Complete understanding. Unconditional belonging. You can’t find these things in other people, even if they so desperately want to give them to you. Nobody can ever know you well enough to meet these needs for you. Nobody except yourself.

You’ve had thoughts that nobody else has ever had.

How could another person fully accept and understand you if they don’t truly know you?

They understand what it’s like to be themselves, and from that perspective they extrapolate what they think it must be like to be you.

That’s why burying yourself, shutting your feelings down, and withdrawing from the world is such a harmful thing to do. If you aren’t a full participant in this life, you lose your greatest ally.

I want to construct a reality that I don’t constantly wish to escape from. And I want you to do it with me.

Asking questions was the most important thing I did to excavate myself.

It won’t last forever. Nothing does, good or bad. It will come back again and again. But it will always relent eventually.

It’s easy to feel like you’re a failure if nothing positive has come out of your suffering.

Not every experience has a beautiful silver lining waiting to be discovered if you look hard enough or meditate long enough.

I want you to start lifting up your thoughts and habits and looking at what hides beneath them. Take the time to get to know and understand your inner processes. Put the beliefs and memories that form the foundation of your personal norms under a cognitive microscope. If you’re anything like most people, you’ll discover that your reasons for continuing some of your most persistent patterns don’t hold up to any real scrutiny.

Once you see what’s underneath, you get to make some choices about what to do with your findings.

You should like most of your life. Not all of it. Not every second of it. But most of it. If you don’t feel this way, we need to find out why. This simple question is your guide.

Feeling drawn to something isn’t an indicator that you like it; all it means is that you find it familiar.

Your subconscious mind isn’t concerned about your emotional health, happiness, or sense of fulfillment with life. It’s only concerned with ensuring your continued physical survival and safety. It keeps you moving in the direction of what you already know, even if what you already know is abuse, invalidation, narcissism, or gaslighting. Whatever you’re used to feels like home, and there will always be a draw to that, even if home was hellish.

We can also lose our sense of what we legitimately like and enjoy through absorbing the beliefs and opinions of those around us.

Do you keep buying the same “healthy” foods over and over again and then proceed to avoid them until they go bad and have to be thrown out?

If you find yourself consistently moving away from something that seems like it “should” be enjoyable to you, don’t blame yourself. Accept that maybe it just isn’t for you after all and that it doesn’t need to be a part of your life.

When you move away from long-standing habits that don’t serve you, or when you finally allow something enjoyable into your life that you’ve denied yourself for so long, you build trust within yourself.

These are the messages being programmed into us from day one. The expectation is that we all know how to do this. Navigate whatever broken systems you have to navigate by yourself. Show no distress, no “weakness,” no feelings at all, or you invite attacks. Never criticize the system. Only blame yourself for not fitting into the system. The world is blameless; you are responsible for everything wrong in your life.

I want you to start rejecting this message. After all, you didn't even choose to exist.

Because you were a child with minimal critical thinking skills, you couldn't discern the bad ideas from the good ideas; you took everything in with no filter, no vetting of concepts and rules. You soaked up beliefs, arbitrary norms and regulations, behavioral patterns, communication styles, and everything else you were exposed to.

You are blamed for being changed by a life you didn't choose.

I’m over it. I am completely 100% over the brokenness we are expected to accept every day when we can be rejected for the slightest flaw or mistake. I am absolutely sick and tired of being expected to have a positive relationship with a narcissistic, gaslighting mess of a society.

I think this world has been horrible to you at times and that the world itself holds much of the responsibility for where your life is today. You've experienced things you should never have experienced, things you had no way to avoid. You've been asked to overcome challenges that nobody bothered to teach you how to overcome.

don't believe that anyone has consistently given you the reassurance and validation you needed to hear. I think you were thrown straight into this chaos and expected to thrive. If

You were handed the freedom to make dangerous, destructive, life-altering choices based on your chronological age, not on how much guidance you were given about the consequences of those choices. At some point it was decided that, going forward, you were fully responsible for your own well-being. There weren’t any established criteria used to determine when this shift happened.

Some of us have to try to learn impulse control from addicts. Some of us have to try to learn stress management from burnt-out workaholics.

We’re asked to trust that the people in charge will do the right thing, even though we know from psychology’s dark past that people will abuse and electrocute one another and feel justified in doing so if instructed to by an authority figure.

In many ways, we don't work the way it seems like we should. How many of these have happened to you?

Trying so hard not to think about something that you can't stop thinking about it Becoming more nervous or stressed out because you avoided something that made you anxious

Remember This: When you catch yourself shaming, blaming, or judging yourself to an unreasonable degree, respond to the lie with a statement like: “I’m still working through the effects of events I didn’t choose to experience.”

Stop assuming that the problem lies with you. It's more likely that the world has failed you. This world sells you on promises, and then it breaks them.

There are two worlds that you experience. There is an objective “real world” that exists outside of all of us.

The colors you see are a simulation of a visual experience. They only exist in your perception, your world. The objective external world is something else entirely, something you will never accurately know.

No matter what happens outside of you, your mind will always belong to you. You are the author of your narrative, not the world.

Your nervous system changes over time, and your interpretation of stimuli changes with it. That’s why your subjective tastes aren’t static across your lifespan. Music that once sounded pleasant to your ears becomes grating, and vice versa. You learn to enjoy different foods, and in turn, lose interest in other foods. Each of these shifts changes our inner world.

I’m comfortable sharing with you that I’ve never felt ready for anything I’ve done in my life that was even moderately important.

I’m doing it anyway because of something I’ve learned along the way; most of the time, the feeling of being ready to do something comes a little bit after you start doing it.

You’ll miss out on so many amazing things in your life if you wait to feel ready for them. Your mind just isn’t very accurate at determining what you’re truly capable of at the present moment.