Justice

"The reward [of people liking, caring, etc. about us] feels good, and we keep doing what others want us to do in order to get the reward...with that fear of not getting the reward, we start pretending to be what we are not, just to please others, just to be good enough for someone else. We pretend to be what we are not because we are afraid of being rejected. The fear of being rejected becomes the fear of being not good enough. Eventually we become someone we are not. [Then you begin to judge yourself and become the victim.] The victim carries the blame, the guilt, and the shame. It is the part of us that says,...'I'm not good enough...I'm not worthy of love.' [Then you start to do things that go against your beliefs and others start to judge you for your mistakes.]

True justice is paying only once for each mistake. True injustice is paying more than once for each mistake. How many times do we pay for one mistake? We [humans] have a powerful memory. We make a mistake, we judge ourselves, we find ourselves guilty, and we punish ourselves. If justice exists, then that was enough; we don't need to do it again. But everytime we remember, we judge ourselves again, we are guilty again, and we punish ourselves again, and again, and again. [And then we allow others to do the same for the same mistake.] Is that justice? Ninety five percent of the beliefs we have stored in our minds are nothing but lies, and we suffer because we believe all these lies.

Just being ourself is the biggest fear of humans. We have learned to live our life trying to satisfy other peoples' demands. We have learned to live by other peoples' points of view because of the fear of not being accepted and of not being good enough for someone else...We know we are not what we believe we are supposed to be and so we feel false, frustrated, and dishonest. We try to hide ourselves, and we pretend to be what we are not. We dishonor ourselves just to please other people.

We have the need to be accepted and to be loved by others, but we cannot accept and love ourselves. The more self-love we have the less we will experience self-abuse. Self-abuse comes from self-rejection, and self-rejection comes from having an image of what it means to be perfect and never measuring up to that ideal. Our image of perfection is the reason we reject ourselves; it is why we don't accept ourselves the way we are, and why we don't accept others the way they are."
- Don Miguel Ruiz (from The Four Agreements)

[I have spent the last 3-4 years working on loving myself and accepting who I am as the person I am. I wasn't always that person. I was caught in the trap of doubting that I deserved to be loved or that I deserved good things in my life and so I made bad decisions. I acted the way I thought others thought I should be. This ended tumultuously however in that I started making choices that the real me wouldn't make and before I knew it, I didn't even know myself. It is painful to reflect on these moments in my life and most of them I have blocked from my memory, but when I see how far I have come from that point, I realize it was worth it. I am by no means perfect and reading this reminds me that I still have a long way to go to stop rejecting myself and just love who I am. I get so caught up in my little failures that I forget all of my successes. I judge and re-judge myself for the mistakes I have made in the past instead of focusing on the good choices I have made more recently. I allow others to judge me and I let their judgments get the best of me. But I have allowed these things to happen. I have made an agreement with myself that I would not forgive myself, that I would let others judge me, that I didn't deserve love....and so it has been, and will be some work to break those agreements and form better ones, ones that erase my old way of thinking. I might be half way there...but I still have some eye opening to do and I still have a long way to go.]

"Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see...."
~John Lennon