Self Deception

There are some mornings I wake up with a pit in my stomach. My heart starts racing. Somedays it feels like my skin is on fire. Thoughts start to creep in soon after. They start to flood my head almost as fast as the nauseousness. You see, these days come like waves. Sometimes they’re one right after the other, sometimes they arrive quickly.

With these feelings, came worries. Thoughts that I shouldn’t be here, that I will never be able to be the type of state officer that I needed to be. I don’t understand why I’m here. Now, that caused a completely different problem. You see, this created self deception that not only started to destroy me, but others. 

Every morning when I’d wake up, finally pushing those feelings and thoughts aside, I’d try to be the best friend, officer, teammate that I could be. I’d focus so much on trying to get to what I thought everyone wanted me to be that I lost sight of who I actually was. I became indecisive, wanting to make sure everyone else was able to get what they wanted. I became burnout, just the idea of work sending a pit into my stomach because I couldn’t imagine doing anything less than perfect. I became bland, I was so focused on showing up as this shining individual that I actually lost what made me shine. 

I felt like I was hiding behind fogged glass. It’s just foggy enough to blur the edges on who I am, but yet one wrong action could completely shatter whatever I had tried to create. 

This whole realization happened after a conversation with my mom. She mentioned that the person who I was when I walked across the stage at graduation was not the same person that sat before her. She said that I was so focused on making everyone else happy, filling the thoughts and ideas that they seemingly put in my head. 

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That’s when it all made sense. I had created this false reality of who I needed to be. I had deceived myself into thinking that I had to be this, do this, think this, wear this, all so I could be someone.

This self deception won’t go away immediately, it's going to take time. In fact, for the first time since June, I woke up without a pit in my stomach. While that was a huge step in ridding myself of that deception, those thoughts were still there. It’s going to take time.

I don’t know what your self deception is. Maybe you think that you’re less than you are, you think that you only cause problems, maybe you even think that you shouldn’t be where you are. But, while I don’t know you, I do know that you can overcome this obstacle, because that’s what it is. They’re just thoughts, they’re just feelings. But, they aren’t reality.

Still improving,

Kourtney Otte