朗读内容
Being Too Quiet
By Steve Pavlina
When I was younger, I was conditioned to yield to authority. Go to school. Go to church. Obey the parents.
One of the most common commands was: Be quiet. Hush. Pipe down. Silence is a virtue. Children should be seen and not heard.
So I learned to stay quiet – about problems, about desires, about feelings. I developed a rich inner world, but supposedly it wasn’t meant to be shared. My thoughts were to be kept mostly to myself.
On the positive side, that made me more self-reliant. But it also ensured that I didn’t get to experience what I wanted, as the wants and the communication both got suppressed under a blanket of silence.
It took a long time to learn that it was okay to communicate about needs, desires, and feelings. As I got older, I found people encouraging me to open up and share more, such as friends in college. That was difficult to do though. I wasn’t used to it. When people wanted to know more about me, it felt like they were shining a burning spotlight into my soul. I couldn’t go there, so I shared various masks instead. I kept people at a safe distance.
But this left me stuck inside my own thought bubble with no way to break free from it. Because I couldn’t talk about what I felt, needed, and wanted, no one could help me make improvements. Even if people offered support, it was misguided because they didn’t really know what I wanted. They had to guess, and their guesses were wrong.
As I began making a long-term investment in personal development, I read lots of books and listened to many audio programs. I liked it when other people shared their stories, goals, ambitions, mistakes, and feelings. Every now and then, I’d come across something that struck me as really honest and authentic. And I silently thought to myself, I could never do that.
网友评论