What Lies Do You Tell Yourself?

And how it affects your writing.

I had writer’s block for the longest time. Probably about 6 months.

Well, I did write from time to time, but nothing major and nothing that I wanted to publish.

Every time I would come up with an idea for an article, I would feel like I cannot write on that because I don’t really know.

It is so subjective, I would tell myself. And yet I wrote hundreds of papers and articles on subjective matters like emotions, love, and even those more objective things like capitalism and economy, which I still nonetheless look at from the subjective point of view. So what changed?

How is it that subjectivity and “not really knowing how it is” did not stop me from writing before, but does now?

To write in a state flow is to write authentically. But guess what?

To write authentically, you have to be authentic. You have to be living your truth.

And me, well, I felt like I was. In fact, I felt like my authentic expression took new heights during these last 6 months, while my writing plummeted.

I moved into my own apartment and got so comfortable that every day I have conversations with myself out loud. I started singing and dancing in the shower more often. I cannot count how many times I actually laughed out loud, sometimes at the silliest of things.

For someone, this is their usual life. For me, this is a new level of authenticity that I didn’t even know was possible.

Actually, of course, I did.

Back when we were kids, we were the walking embodiments of authenticity. We all had that child-like playful innocence, the one that didn’t think too much and just was. Laughing, enjoying, singing, dancing and just being as weird as it liked to be. Without the self-consciousness that labeled it as ‘weird’.

I had to abandon that self so early on that I don’t even remember she ever was there. I found the traces of her in the old photographs — the ones where the eyes that meet the camera are full of joy and aliveness.

I managed her resurrection. Now she lives here with me. We laugh, we play, we do ‘weird things’ and we do ‘serious things’ too.

If anything, but authenticity is how I would describe my life lately.

Yet somehow this authenticity covered up the lies I have been telling myself. The lies that I believe so much that I am not even aware that they are lies.

I thought it is about privacy. I am just a private person. The desire to keep things away from other people, not share. How can I ever write if I am so private? How can I make my thoughts public if I am reluctant to share with others what I had for breakfast or did during the day?

While privacy is one thing, and oversharing can indeed be a problem — a boundary problem, which I definitely have — this strong desire to keep everyone out and not share anything with the world goes back to authenticity.

If you are not honest with yourself, you don’t want to share it with others. Because somewhere subconsciously, no matter how much you believe your own lies, you are scared of being found out.

Somehow the imposter syndrome — although, I believe, is a real thing and often comes from feeling like you are not good enough — can also become a cover-up.

Sure, you feel like you are an imposter. Because you are.

I couldn’t write about all these topics I have been writing about prior, because I wasn’t living the truth that I know, the truth that lives in my heart.

Last week sitting in my friend’s living room, I drew a question in a card game (those who read my articles regularly know that I play a lot of those):

“What lies are you currently telling yourself?”

I paused for a while, not because I couldn’t think of any but because so many thoughts started to flood in. I picked the ones that I could admit to myself with relative ease and dismissed the others — the bigger and darker ones, the ones that are keeping me trapped, the ones that if I admit would involve some radical changes, the ones that I rather not deal with right now.

But these thoughts haven’t left me. They started haunting me instead.

It is funny how certain things you already know at the back of your mind, but you manage to suppress and not think about until suddenly somebody asks you a direct question and it all surfaces through.

It makes me think of koans in Japanese Zen Buddhism practice, which are paradoxical statements, stories or questions used to provoke sudden realization — insight — and at times even an epiphany, opening up the door to kensho — “seeing one’s true nature”.

I wouldn’t say that I opened the door to the path to enlightenment that night, but I certainly saw my authentic self.

She was standing there all unapologetic and bare, holding the truth so fiercely in her hands. “ There, look”, — she said. And I…

I, in my usual manner, told her: “Not now”.

Not now, as I often say to my inner child, as my parents used to tell me when I would come to them with my problems. Not now.

Only when if not now?

When it cannot wait any longer.

In my native language, Russian, they have an expression. Whenever someone is in a rush somewhere unnecessarily, you ask “Is it burning?”, which means that only fire that can make matters so urgent.

“Is it on fire? Is the house burning?” — I asked.

“No, it is just getting hot and uncomfortable.” — she said.

“Oh, so it is okay then. Let’s wait.”

Let’s wait until we are forced to leave. Let’s wait until you cannot look anywhere but at those lies you told yourself.

Sure, we can wait. It can all wait. The world won’t end. Life will go on.

You will still have fun and joy and other things.

We can wait. But what is the price of this waiting? What price does a child pay whose parents are dismissive and never are there emotionally?

What price does an adult pay who refuses to step into their own light and power? Who lives in a fantasy world which constantly clashes with reality?

For some, the price justifies the trade-off.

Waiting and not getting honest with yourself gives you safety. As a writer with constant writer’s block, you can feel safe in your inability to write, in your own failure to realize your own desires and expectations. There is nothing you can do about it after all.

Let’s just wait. Maybe inspiration will come. Maybe it won’t.

But it is not about waiting for it to come. It is your job to invite it. And to invite it, you have to align yourself with it.

Creativity is our power. In Yogic philosophy, its energy resides in our sacral chakra, Svadhisthana.

“Svadhisthana means “the dwelling place of the self”. The sacral chakra relates to emotional and sexual energy in the body and our ability to flow with change.”

If we are disconnected from our Higher Self, we are unable to enter the state of creative flow as we are not flowing with life — with the changes that need to take place.

In theory, we can wait forever. We can delay. We can resist. Even when the universe is doing everything to put us on the right path, we can still resist, stick to our own ways — to the rigid ideas of our own minds, to the vision of how we want things to be rather than what they actually are.

But in resistance, we can never find openness for inspiration to come through.

In resistance, we don’t just lose ourselves. We lose so much more: opportunities for growth and connection, new people and situations entering our lives, and all the gifts we could give to this world, if only we chose to step into our power and live authentically.

If only we got radically honest with ourselves.

Anna Aksenovich is a writer with a background in Sociocultural Anthropology and Psychoanalysis. She is fascinated with human behavior and has recently launched her own publication Know Why to dig deeper into the workings of the human mind and find answers to the ultimate question “Why do we do things that we do?”.