The Challenges of Making Bold Life Changes

[Raphael]

It is at stage Turquoise and beyond (cause let's be honest I'm reaching it and I can see some Yellow limitations from a Turquoise perspective. This is also another reason why I have been so much agitated lately)

[Raphael]

Sleep will help. It will reveal my fully integrated self.

[Raphael]

True self, true self, fully integrated Raphael reveal yourself as simple, complex, and sophisticated that you are.

[Raphael]

As I'm writing this, things feel very painful for me but I guess that this is what making bold life changes is about. I feel a lot of burn in my stomach and in my chest, something is trying to come back to the surface but this is difficult. It is appearing and disappearing, appearing and disappearing. It seems to be all about self-expression.

I noticed that when I'm writing more I'm gaining confidence and it feels good. I spent 4 years barely speaking to anyone, barely expressing myself. At a point I got so much isolated that it felt like I was loosing my cognitive capacities and it felt scary because of how much I value the mind. However often time the mind is an escape from the pain and I hidden in the mind most of my life.

I'm just at the beginning of the process, I barely scratched the surface so far. The last 4 years have been the most painful years for me yet I still haven't inspected my childhood properly. So far I don't have any addictions which is a good sign but I have difficulties making what I want to make. I've been ashamed of my failures for years, I've been ashamed of not fulfilling societies expectations, my dad's expectations, my family expectations, Leo's expectations.

When I'm ashamed, when I lack self-esteem I recluse. When I have self-esteem, I interact with others and I started to gain back this self-esteem in recent months.

This journal is a mess but I didn't had anything in mind while starting it, it is just there for self-expression even if it looks ugly, even if I cringe, even if I feel ashamed and it feels good. It is possible to know what people feels from what they are writing and as I'm writing more and more I feel more liberated and more authentic. I feel exposed and vulnerable. I had difficulties with vulnerabilities most of my life I think that I absorbed that from my dad because he always hidden his vulnerabilities and reacted aggressively, he couldn't admit any mistakes even the smallest one.

[Raphael]

There's a lot of emotional baggage in my stomach and I'm ashamed of it because I feel like I didn't suffer enough. After all some people get attacked, some people have car accidents, some people are repeatedly beaten by their parents, some people are raped where I didn't experienced all that. So far what I think happened to me is that:

1. I'm an Highly Sensitive Person (HSP): I'm hesitant about labeling me like that because when reading about it I at the same time resonate and don't resonate with a certain number of traits. However, the thing is that I do feel I have highly developed senses (much more developed than normal), I feel things very deeply / experience life strongly and because of that I have to manage myself carefully. I also notice a lot of subtleties that most people don't even care about.
2. I absorbed my dads traumas just by growing up with him. I have the feeling that his life has been so intense that he can traumatize people only by his presence.
   • He had/have many limiting beliefs:
     • It's bad to self-express
     • It's bad to be shy and to not be extroverted
     • I should shut up and obey to everything that he says
     • School and academia is the most important thing (even if he doesn't understand anything about academia himself)
     • I'm dumb, lazy, and incompetent, and will never succeed at anything in life
     • Women are another specie that is inferior to men
     • White people are overall better where we (non white people, especially blacks) are bad
     • Failing is life is bad
     • Succeeding in life is bad
     • I don't have to give a shit about anyone
     • We need to go fast, everything have to go fast
     • The smallest mistake is terrible
     • Relationships are bad, it's better to be all alone
     • My dad is bad and the worst person ever (this is the experience that he had of his dad who traumatized him)
     • All people are bad, all people wants to scam us or are jealous. They are observing us all of time, we need to hide, to close all the curtains in the house. It happened many times when I was a kid that he would criticize us (me, my mom, or sister) if only an inch of a window wouldn't be covered by a curtain
     • Life is hard, I should suffer. I should work all day long like a mule until I die
   • Also:
     • He have 0 schedule, 0 organization
     • He is impulsive
     • It's always his way instead of others ways therefore it's difficult to do something because he wants to show that he knows best
     • He don't know how to communicate, he have no politeness
     • He cannot learn anything. For example, he cannot learn how to use a microwave
     • He is archaic and lives in 1950, any technological advancement is a bad thing for him

Edited December 21, 2021 by Raphael

[Raphael]

Overall, I consider that I did a great job avoiding my dad's traps even though it wasn't perfect. His example was so bad that it motivated me to do the complete opposite.

Edited December 21, 2021 by Raphael

[Raphael]

Feels great, self-expression feels great especially on a public forum. I already feel some relief.

[Raphael]

What Similarities Do I Have With Leo

• I am an INTP and Leo is an INTP
• Intellect is my strength and intellect is also Leo's strenght
• I'm naturally philosophical and introspective and Leo is naturally philosophical and introspective
• I'm good at public speaking and doing presentations and Leo is also good at public speaking
• I have been shy and bad with people most of my life and Leo have also been shy and bad with people most of his life
• I had difficulties been comfortable with girls and been attractive to the opposite sex just like Leo
• I suffered huge body image issues and Leo suffered huge body image issues
• I have relationship issues with my dad and Leo had relationship issues with his dad.
• I started to have some gut issues this year and Leo also suffered from gut issues
• I grew up as a minority and my parents didn't teach me the language spoken by the majority of people in the country where I live where Leo moved from Russia when he was a kid and didn't know how to speak English.
  • I personally experienced a deep feeling of being different since a very young age amplified by the fact of me being mixed-race and not fitting to any major ethnic group. The feeling of not belonging has always been huge for me, I created an identity out of it
  • I can speak and understand the local language but I have an accent and it makes me feel awkward.
• I'm an ectomorph so I'm tall and skinny like Leo

These similarities are frightening. Leo always felt like my clone.

[Raphael]

What Differences Do I Have With Leo

• I was an above average student where Leo was an excellent student and graduated as a philosophy major
  • Leo represents my academic ideal, my academic potential.
  • I noticed that I have some academic shame because:
    • I wasn't part of the top students where my dad was obsessed with me being good at school
    • At 16, I didn't choose the scientific section but another section because it allowed me to do some web development. I thought I knew my purpose at that age (building a big tech company) so my attitude was "screw all this science it's not going to be useful for me" and let's focus on web development but things didn't went as I expected... So I didn't do a lot of biology, chemistry, physics and similar things and I'm ashamed of that because:
      • It feels like my scientific and rational foundation is missing
      • I feel like I'm dumb because we associate the ideal of being smart with typical science
      • Some people told me that I was wasting my life and wasting my potential by making this choice
      • The section that I choose was a section considered for "dumb people" so there's this label dumb on me again
    • However, I am conscious of the limitations of this shame:
      • Computer science is one of the most rational activity that can exists so I did develop my rational brain
      • What is science in the end except symbols that refers to symbols that have some rules that doesn't mean anything in the end?
    • However, as science is massively used to describe existence I still feel some shame because I feel that something is missing within me.

[Raphael]

What Attracted Me To Leo

• The clean presentation
• The intellectual side
• The no-BS approach
• The hyper masculine approach used many times in some old videos
  • This is why a part of me feel that my relationship with actualized.org is trauma-related because Leo's approach reminds me of my dad and reminds of the obsession with work of my dad

[Raphael]

Just now, Raphael said:

This is why a part of me feel that my relationship with actualized.org is trauma-related because Leo's approach reminds me of my dad and reminds of the obsession with work of my dad

Am I here for that? Am I here to relieve some toxic masculinity traumas again and again? Am I am here to relieve some work and success traumas again?

Am I using this forum properly?

[Raphael]

Just now, Raphael said:

Am I using this forum properly?

Not always, I used it to get some success and visibility and to fulfill my ego. I also absorbed some thoughts from it that weren't that useful nor authentic.

However, I did grow a lot from it and did interact with incredible people.

[Raphael]

Currently my mental state is: fast throwing everything that I have with minimum analyzing.

Sometimes it's great to be thoughtful, careful, and take time sometimes it's better to just throw everything out without thinking too much about it. It feels great so far to just throw things out even if it's messy. I already feel enormous relief.

Edited December 21, 2021 by Raphael

[Raphael]

Also, going back to impostor syndrome again: I feel like an impostor within this community.

[Preety_India]

15 minutes ago, Raphael said:

Also, going back to impostor syndrome again: I feel like an impostor within this community.

Why did you feel like an imposter? 

What did you do that makes you think you acted like an impostor? 

 

[Raphael]

2 minutes ago, Preety_India said:

Why did you feel like an imposter? 

What did you do that makes you think you acted like an impostor?

These questions feels like me talking to myself. I could have asked them to myself like this:

20 minutes ago, Raphael said:

Also, going back to impostor syndrome again: I feel like an impostor within this community.

@Raphael

Why did you feel like an imposter? 

What did you do that makes you think you acted like an impostor?

[Preety_India]

@Raphael what answer did you get for those questions? 

 

[Raphael]

@Preety_India

The answers are going to come, it's more about leveling up emotionally than making sense intellectually. I'm currently leveling up and it is dirty to see.

Edited December 21, 2021 by Raphael

[Preety_India]

I hope you find the answers to all your questions 

You seem to have been through a fair amount of struggle. 

I hope you find your path and it leads you to a place of meaning, freedom, purpose and peace. 

 

[Raphael]

Ok. My intestines has been twisting themselves for hours... until now. This feeling feels almost completely exhausted now. What feeling?

This feeling, it feels the same but we can put different names on it:

• The pressure to achieve or fear of not achieving
• The pressure to be someone or fear of not being someone
• The pressure to succeed in life or fear of not succeeding in life
• The pressure to be a societal ideal of success or fear of not being a societal ideal of success
• The pressure to self-actualized or fear of not self-actualizing
• The fear of never being good enough
• The insecurity of not being appropriate