Most of my life growing up in the church, I learned that peace comes from Jesus, or God, the Holy spirit, perhaps one taking turns while the other is busy supposedly helping the world in some way or another. I'd always hear testimonies of people who didn't feel at ease with themselves until they accepted Jesus into their lives, and learned the joy of his forgiveness. Perhaps I could never quite grasp the concept of 'letting go and letting God'. I do think I tried. Perhaps I didn't try hard enough. But I could never really find the peace that Christians say come automatically once they join the fold.
In the past few months since I decided I no longer count myself as one, I posted before about how I wanted to essentially train myself to stop feeling. To be honest, I thought even I couldn't do it. I thought eventually once I'd gotten over past events, I would be back to my old self, hoping for things I've never been able to get and getting disappointed again. And there were a few times when I lapsed and the emotions would hit me like a tonne of bricks.
Well, nothing we want comes without a bit of effort, and after some recent events, I think that I've come pretty close, if not completely achieved what I set out to do. I do not want to go into the details what the events were, but essentially one involved several family members creating a mountain out of a molehill during what was supposed to be happy occasion, which led to me getting personally attacked for making what I meant as a benign comment. The other was finding out a person I care about and respect a lot turned out to be a lot different from what I thought, and keeping a lot more secrets from me than I was led on to believe.
Previously in such situations, I would have broken down, gotten upset, and a lot of other things which makes me really unproductive and probably not much fun to be around. This time, I had completely no such reaction. No sadness. No anger. Just some slight amazement at how things turned out the way they did. That's it.
And I am quite pleased with myself. I have learned that a lot of things in life, particularly the behaviour of people, is out of my control and getting emotional about it brings no benefit to me whatsoever. I cannot hope for people to change and so many of my expectations of people, heck, of life in general, have not been met. Nevertheless, rather than choose to let it affect me like before, I'd now rather let it slide as part and parcel of life. I can only change myself, and even that also, is a challenge in which I must in some aspects learn to accept the way I am, of course always trying to improve, but not feeling like shit if I fail.
I guess I can say I got the peace I've been looking for all along, and the best part was that it came from no one and nothing else but myself.
