What powers lie in refusing to be tamed?

That’s the headline I saw in a contemporary art gallery this weekend.

And given some thought, there are two perspectives on how you want to look at this.

The first one is the stubbornness of someone who simply doesn’t want to give up their ways and habits. The second one is the difficulty one has throughout their life, of falling in line with the person that they are. With their most authentic selves.

I also found a third perspective, but that was from my misunderstanding. At first, I thought it was “what powers the lie in refusing to be tamed?” as in why do people lie just because they refuse to be tamed. And by far, it seemed like the most interesting to me.

So I’ll go through what these perspectives represent for me, and maybe it will help you or give an aha moment too.

Stubbornness is a bish. You may say you want to change a flaw in you, whether it is having a conversation to reply rather than listen, or not communicating things that bother you.

And you are putting some effort into this, like thinking about it a lot, and promising yourself that when the next opportunity arrives, you’ll keep quiet, observe more and do better.

But what you do observe, soon, is that your promise means a nudge rather than a change of course, because when that discussion fires up, you realize you don’t have practice yet.

And so it’s easier to fall back into what you used to do.

But a nudge is good too. It’s great in fact.

It is the first step in acknowledging that some action needs to be taken for your well-being.

But the thing is, you can say that nudge from your mouth or from a shallow carcass that is your rational self, without really meaning it.

You can say: starting from tomorrow, I want to do my laundry in the first part of the day. If you don’t truly want that, it won’t happen just because you verbalized it in an empty room.

So the key here is to really want to change something. And that only comes from realizing the ways that it can impact you if you don’t.

And also, having someone who gives you some insight about you that you might not notice is helpful.

How you’re perceived by others can differ a lot from what you see. And it happened to me, an awful lot of times.

I used to think I was the greatest listener ever.

Until people I had a close relationship with told me that’s not the case. That I often interrupt, I listen to reply, and I shift the focus towards me, not always, but often. You know..”Oh, that’s great to hear! When I’ve been there, this crazy thing happened when…”

How could I think I’m a great listener? I don’t know. To me, that was more than enough. To others, it was a joke.

I guess I just didn’t want to be invisible. I wanted to be remembered and to stand out through a great story.

Up until I listened to people talking about this topic, and I realized how that affected my relationships, I thought I was doing wonderfully.

And now I know, and things have changed quite drastically from where I was, but I have a long long long way ahead.

And that’s just what it is, no point in sugar coating it.

And besides seeing how that affected my relationships, I started thinking more about how I would love to be treated.

I dislike being interrupted.

I dislike people who start talking about themselves all of a sudden when you were talking about something yourself (not a rule, but more often than not. Some people are just bubbly, and I like that sometimes), and I dislike people who listen to reply.

Again — I still plough right ahead for that reply myself, whenever I see a trigger flying like a saucepan in front of me.

It’s like aaaaa — grab me, grab me. And here I go again.

But my trick to the people who do that to me now is to just stop for a few seconds, look at them, and then continue calmly, on a lower frequency, without giving the information that they interrupted for.

Or without giving it to them entirely.

Like..I’m keeping the details to myself, thanks.

Usually, what happens is they’re not satisfied fully, and they let you go on. The third time they do it, they might lose their mood to interrupt.

They now know you can’t be pushed over that easily.

Maybe it’s good, maybe not, I don’t know. That’s what I feel is right, and a better solution than leaving the room and causing a bigger conflict.

Other than these examples, I see the stubbornness in changing your ways as straight-up dumb.

The whole point of this life, for me, is enjoying the moment, finding peace, and having a real connection with someone who’s different than you, and who brings out your true self, in the same measure as they help you become your best version.

All the things we do in life are for that connection.

Whether you’re expressing it through your work, hoping that someone you admire notices, hoping you’ll make history and change people’s minds on a bigger scale, or whether you’re single, going guns blazing for that bold conversation, hoping to seem interesting enough.

It’s all because of the pursuit of connection.

Yes, you’re supposed to be all trauma-healed before having someone in your life. But I think that thinking you are healed, and being healed are sometimes different roads.

And there are very few people who don’t bring their baggage into a new relationship.

Very few.

You may think you’re healed because that works for you and your little world. But when a new one is unveiled, you might find out that not only have you tapped into new trauma, but you also have some more healing to do.

Oupsie.

And eventually, when you keep doing that, that’s when you fall in line and in love with the person in front of you.

That’s when you know your level of understanding, wisdom, and emotional intelligence has grown so much that you align with your genuine self.

I think it’s one of the greatest feelings in the world.

You no longer think with dread about your bad habits. You know they’re there. You know they haven’t disappeared completely, but you now know you have the tools to master them.

So make all the necessary changes for your mind and soul. Staying stubborn as an excuse for “not being tamed” is just silly.

I’ll leave the last perspective, the one in which you lie to “protect” your wilderness, for another article. I believe it has many more complexities than I initially thought.

D.

This article was originally posted on Medium.