I have a friend, a good friend who has a friend who says, “I know you are very sure, but you may not be right...”
Fuck, that hit me the first time she said it, and every single time thereafter!
I think this really applies to most of us, but it really landed with me as I am often VERY SURE and until this phrase was uttered, never really accounted for how wrong I am and how frequently. I have a head that spins very believable things, ideas, concepts and plans. I mean, it is literally all my head does, all day, every day. It just manufactures ideas and thoughts that I tend to believe as fact. In fact, I am quite sure, often, that whatever I think is 100% reliable. Newsflash: it isn’t.
I am wrong a lot. I mean, like, a lot, a lot. However, that has not stopped or even really hindered my being very sure about a great number of things...
And so, as I tend to do, I have attempted to unwind this whole being sure business. Like why am I always so very sure? What is underneath all this sureness? How can one person be so fucking sure, and so completely wrong, repeatedly? And why have I not looked at this with more interest and desire to change it until now?
I am a relatively smart person. And this intellect of mine has allowed me to think grand thoughts, like all day, every day. I am a thinker. I prefer this to almost everything else in life. I will think rather than feel, or talk things out, or intuit. And one reason, in fact the main reason, is that thinking is a solitary adventure. I guess so are intuiting and to some degree feeling, but those things are more other people dependent than thinking. With thinking, you can do what you do and I can manufacture a whole host of thoughts in defense of whatever you did or didn’t do. I can think thoughts that will explain your behavior and its attendant shittiness. So thinking really gets me there! I can think about why you did what you did, and then I can think other thoughts to sort it all out. And you are not even really required! I can get it all sorted without you. And therein lies the appeal for me...thinking is a solitary action about other people that I can do alone, and it can bring me immediately comfort, relief and peace of mind.
Now being right about all of that is not ever really been required. See, rightness doesn’t even need to come into the picture, along with accuracy, it can and does exist in whatever form comes up in my head. I need no one else, because in here with all these thoughts swimming about, I feel relatively safe, secure and shielded from the reality that I feel is my job to explain.
And until the above phrase was uttered, the whole correctness or rightness about the whole endeavor was immaterial. It just wasn’t part of my deal. But now, now that this whole rightness thing was introduced, well, I think you can see my problem.
I am very, very good at being very sure. I am a master at it, in fact. I am fucking sure about a great number of things, and as it turns out, I am dead wrong about many of these things, of which until recently, I have been very sure about.
This is very interruptive to living. I mean, for a long fucking time I have just been very sure and ran with it. And now, due to this pesky and irritating statement, I am now having to call into question, well, everything I think. And suddenly this retreat, this solace I found in the confines of my own mind and head, have become very unreliable causing me to feel very unsure about, well, everything.
I mean what is sureness if it is not concerned with accuracy? Delusion. We call that delusion.
And so it has come as a bit of a shock to me, that I am delusional. I mean, I knew that when I was drinking that my thinking was faulty, but I bought into the newly created delusion that now that I am sober, reality based thinking was prevailing. And it was, until I realized that I was really just still being very sure with no accordance for accuracy.
We all know feelings are not facts...but perhaps a more important statement to toss about would be, “neither are thoughts...” They are, as it turns out, just as unreliable as those fucking feelings. And both thoughts and feelings for me have been pretty light on the whole accuracy thing.
So I have gone through this life, very fucking sure with absolutely no factual basis for any of it. I have just been very sure that what I have defensively thought and planned, was accurate...so you can imagine my current distress when I am faced with the austere reality that not everything I am sure about has any basis in reality as we know it.
What is happening for me, is that I am noticing when all this sureness bubbles up and I am taking notice of it. I am now acutely aware of all the sureness swelling up in my life and am now asking the much harder question, “yes, yes you are quite sure, but are you right?” And I will tell you that this whole investigative process really sucks. Because fuck if I can ever answer that question, well, or correctly. I have no idea whether I am right. I just know that I have begun to mistrust my own sureness. I am in this place where when the very sureness lands, I become immediately suspect and more than a little worried.
I know that I have a head that has thought up things, conjured them really, to a point of being in full flight from reality. And so I am now very suspect of all the things I think that come with the “very, sure” stamp of approval. That shit used to just sail right on through my mind and land over in the correctness column...now, that correctness column is pretty fucking empty. I am not sure of anything because accuracy has come to supplant all this sureness.
Truth is I cannot ever be sure that I am right. So what is the use of being sure, if one is not also correct. So really, in one fucking statement, my whole way of living has been called into question...making me wonder and worry and stop me in my tracks. So here I sit, quite idle, being unsure of many, many things, while I attempt to sort out the veracity and accuracy of all the shit I think and feel and intuit. I mean, when you start asking yourself the question of “is this actually true?” All the sureness in the world doesn’t fucking matter, really at all.
It has been a bit of a hard go for me lately. I am being called out and to live life differently...and that has caused me to see some glaring deficiencies in my own ability to live and love and show up and do this whole deal. And I will admit it has been a bit derailing and I have felt stymied on how to move out and beyond. Somedays, I just wing it. I mean, most days I just wing it. And that isn’t really any different than the way I was living before...I have always been a "fly by the seat of my pants" kind of person, but now I am doing it with a nod towards factual accuracy and with a lot less sureness about the whole fucking living endeavor.
So me being very sure has become something that I kind of fear. I mean, when I see myself being very sure about something, it immediately stops me, “Oh fuck, wait, there I am being very fucking sure again...we know how this turned out last time, and the time before that...” And so life has gotten very interesting up in my head. It is like I have been given a new loop to orbit with my mad thinking abilities and now I often feel caught up in this loop with only accuracy (of which I am never completely sure) to pull me out of this endless cycle of thinking, feeling and intuiting.
So you can imagine that my head is an ever busier place than usual, which should frighten you, I mean it is my head and I am fucking terrified. But it does give me a new tool to work with, this tool of accuracy which I was never really all that concerned with before. And I am fucking lawyer! You would think that someone with my training would have caused truth to have entered the equation long before now. But sadly, nope.
So I am busy over here, watching all my sureness evaporate under the hot hood of factual integrity. And it is changing my thinking which in turn changes my feeling and of course, the intuiting is also up for grabs. In some ways it is kind of refreshing, when it stops being terrifying. I can see now that being very sure, was just a very nice cover for me being completely uninterested in reality. I mean, why bother with facts when your own ideas give you a stable basis for living?
Um, because what I think is always subject to revision. And nothing revises sureness more than facts.
So if you see me wandering around, walking the dogs looking a bit frustrated and somewhat out of my mind, know that I am over there just trying to allow the sureness to pass so that perhaps some veracity can land. And with that, perhaps reality doesn’t kick my ass so badly this time...
Again.
Still.
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