The one belief that runs our life
We all have a dominating belief that seems to govern the patterns in our life. We don’t choose it, we probably didn’t realize it exists until our 20s or 30s.
But its underneath everything that shapes our life. We don't remember signing up for it. But it's there, under everything, an old sentence about who we are, and it decides more than we would ever admit. It decides what we notice. It decides what we fear, who we love, what we chase and what we give up. It decides which door we walk through in life.
it can sometimes hide on the good days. But it doesn’t hide when we're stressed. When we're cornered. When the ground moves under us or we get punched in the face. That's when the belief shows its face. That's when we become the physical manifestation of this belief.
And here's the part that took me years to swallow. We don't just carry the belief. We feed it. We arrange our whole lives, quietly, without knowing, to prove it right again and again. It's the most dangerous thing I know about being a person.
The more closely I work or do hard things with others the more I see this pattern in others - this seems to be dominant thing that shows up again and again.
The man who is always left out
I have a friend who lives, I think, by the sentence I am going to be left out.
He would never say it. Ask him and he'd laugh. But watch him. Watch what happens when the party invite doesn't come. Watch him when a meeting happens without him, when the good project lands on someone else's desk. Something in him leans forward, almost glad, like a man who finally found his keys. See. There it is again.
He reads the whole world through that one narrow window. The text comes late and he reads it. The door is closed and he reads that. It always says the same thing. He is not crazy. He is faithful. He keeps faith with the belief.
Anaïs Nin wrote a line she called Talmudic: We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
The girl who thinks she is unlovable
I have a beautiful friend, who seems to be believe this deeply.
She nurtures this belief and it shows up by choosing men who are sometimes unavailable emotionally, who seems to throw breadcrumbs rather than celebrating her.
She seems to manifest situations where her internal belief could be fed. Chasing partners who don’t show up for her, believing that if she tried harder, loved more, cared more, they will magically love her. The pattern has repeated in her last 3 relationships over last 7 years.
The man who is special, and waiting
Another man I knew ran on a different sentence: I am special, and all I need is the right opportunity.
It feels like confidence. It photographs like ambition. But under it is a trap. If you are already special, you don't build. You wait. You keep the powder dry for the big moment that will finally match your size.
So he waits, the blame is external. Every move is predictable for him, and only if he starred in a different movie - the script will play out to his greatness. The result : he hasn’t improved in ages I think, he has stopped growing IMO. And every time the world failed to hand him the moment he was owed, the belief got stronger, because now he had proof the world just didn't get it yet. He wasn't behind. He was just at the wrong place.
The specialness was real. The waiting is real too.
The woman who would not be a burden
There was a woman I worked beside for a year, and her sentence was I must not be a burden.
She gave and gave. She remembered your birthday, covered your shift, carried the part of the project nobody else would touch. Ask if she needed anything and she'd already be pouring your coffee. She was the best of us. She was also disappearing in service of others.
Because the belief doesn't let you ask. Asking is weight, and weight is the crime. So she never said she was drowning. She said she was fine, and she said it beautifully, and the more she did, the more people expected, and if she didn’t do as much, it seems liked she was dissapointing. She hated disappointing others and not being helpful.
That's the thing about these beliefs. They don't only hurt you. They train the people around you to hurt you too, gently, without meaning to, exactly the way you taught them.
The man who had to hold the wheel
And one more, a man who lived by I am not safe unless I control it.
He controlled the meeting. He controlled the calendar. He controlled the dinner, the drive, the plan, the plan's backup, the backup's backup. Give him a thing he couldn't steer and you could watch the fear rise up in his neck. He called it process and standards. He would call it caring.
What it was, was an absolute sub-concious fear that future would not be okay, and the only way around it was for him to control every bit of things leading up to it.
My own sentence
I operate under the belief “I am unlovable, unless I have it all” and it has meant competing across multiple dimensions as if that was the most important dimension and drains me of energy and makes me feel more like a someone constantly chasing. I will hold on to things because if I lose it, I will lose some part of the love. I will hold on to gfs longer than I should or stay in otherwise an unfulfilling relationship, since losing them will mean I am unlovable.
The more I exhibit and protect this belief, the more I see it in others expectation of me. My boundaries blur, my needs become secondary, I am always chasing.
And the self-care, the rest, the small kindnesses a person is supposed to give himself — those never made the list. Because self-love wasn’t something others could love me for, and only recently learning that they can.
Realizing these beliefs is incredibly important, if we want to not live our live in repeated circles.
Jung said it colder. When you don't make the thing inside you conscious, it shows up outside as fate. You call it your luck. Your personality. Just how things go for someone like you.
We think about 6,000 thoughts a day, most of them are repetitions of old ones. The old code that gets wired early has been thought tens of times a day over 1000s of days . Something got wired early — some need that didn't get met when we were small — and every year since, we've worn the groove deeper.
Psychologists have a whole map of these. Most of them come down to three ugly little sentences: I'm helpless. I'm unlovable. I'm worthless. Almost every private catastrophe we carry is a remix of one of those three.
Bad news: We are not getting cured
We don't beat the belief. I want to be honest about that. There's no day we wake up cured, no morning the old sentence is simply gone.
But we can catch it. We can learn its voice. We can feel it move in our chest the second before we act: the lean toward the empty chair, the drink, the smoke, the junk food, the anger, the despair, the reach for the thing you should release. Just once, then twice, we have to not obey this voice.
That's the whole move. Making the unconscious conscious, so it stops running our life as fate and starts running as just a voice in our head, that we can finally doubt.
Joan Didion wrote that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. True.
But some of the stories are killing us slowly, and we keep telling them anyway, because at least they're ours, at least they're familiar, at least when they come true we get to be right.
So find your sentence. Everybody has one. Say it out loud, the ugly little verdict you've been proving your whole life. Then look at how much of your day you spend keeping it alive.
