So what is it? It seems to me that I have, in my life thus far, stood outside the gates of substantial personal growth a few times. Each time, I can already feel the real-life changes by merely staring through the gate. But as I approach to enter, I blackout and find myself once again on the outside of the gate—it usually feels as if I’ve been rejected and propelled further than from where I started. The whole process lasts about a year sometimes less sometimes more.
Why is it that every time I begin to grow that somewhere in the process I find myself right back where I started? It could be that I don’t come with enough to sacrifice—I’m too young, I haven’t yet experienced the loss and the pain required to grow. It makes sense as with every time I approach the gate anew, the same lessons I learned the times before are ever more clearer, ever more meaningful to me given the recent difficulties that I have been through which I would adamantly proclaim were the “most difficult things I have ever dealt with (yes even more difficult than “that time” or “that time before”)”.
And I can only be fooled by life so many times. I retain a fair amount of embarrassment from the fact that it has taken me so many false starts to get one lesson or the other. I would think I had mastery of a virtue or discipline or life truth in the good times, but when tested, I abandon my lofty philosophy and panic—I take to the streets announcing my ruin and lamenting the recent and unjust loss of this or that in my life. I stress and I stress. In turn, I blame my self and then others, my self and then so many others. And then in a parade of horrors, resign to my room alone, hold my breath, and squeeze, as if through throwing a depression tantrum God will reach down and give me my way. It’s humiliating given my age and what I ought to know by now.
God calls my bluff and does nothing although I threaten to abandon my belief in Him. He keeps his poker face. And eventually I tire myself out in my misery. Exhausted and out of options I’m forced to accept whatever it was that upset me so severely in the first place. And when I say accept, I mean come to terms that it happened, that it hurt me a great deal, that it is NOT what I wanted, that I may never have it the way I wanted, and that it may or may not have been fair. And then I move on. And it is the moving on that brings me right back in front of the Gate. In my search for what I did wrong, I am returned to the arms of the very truths and principles I abandoned in the chaos of challenge and obstacles. In my search for healing I find that they remain there, unchanged by what has happened since the last time I saw them, more applicable than before and had I had the consciousness of mind to apply them then I could have saved myself much heartache, despair, depression, and trouble.
This in itself is enough to trigger another crisis as I can get depressed about how much time I wasted or how things could have been different if I were more mature and didn’t forget the things I had learned. But worst of all I could come to the crushing conclusion that no matter what I do, I will always end up back in front of the gate of personal development, doomed to never cross its threshold, doomed to always lose my-self in the everyday challenges of life—lose hold of the truths that are to be my weapons against floundering at the most basic level of human development.
I refuse.
And maybe it’s because I stand before the gate once again, and consequently, influenced to the point where I’m drunk with the confidence that I can evolve that I say so with no trouble. All that I have been through thus far was not in vain. The misery I have endured, self-inflicted or otherwise, since I moved to New York and entered law school will serve an important purpose. It will be my sacrifice, my toll to pass the threshold. The feelings of inadequacy, failure, heartbreak, loss, emptiness, fear, anxiety, embarrassment, addiction, frustration, and all the other nightmares I have harvested in the past year and some odd months will now serve their purpose as I believe I have enough to pay the toll.
