A BALANCED PERSONALITY PART 1: WHY LIGHT DOESN’T EQUAL HAPPY

Finding a balance between the “dark” and “light” aspects of your personality can be a struggle. Over the years, I’ve tipped toward both at times and, in my experience, leaning toward either extreme sucks.

When I was unbalanced toward the dark side of my personality, I equated the “light” side with happiness. It seemed to make sense. I wasn’t happy being unbalanced toward dark so I believed that being the opposite would be what I needed to do to be happy. I worked hard to change myself for years, and finally ended up leaning pretty heavily toward light. I expected to be happy . . . but I wasn’t.

WHY WASN’T I HAPPY?

Trying to be unbalanced toward light made me overly concerned about the feelings of everyone around me. I had made myself responsible for my family and friend’s happiness, and as a result I sacrificed myself and what I wanted for the happiness of everyone else.

I was denying and suppressing the “dark” aspects of my personality because I thought they were bad. I thought being primarily “light” would be a good thing, but in denying the other part of my nature, I suppressed the things that would actually help me. I got to a point where I lost myself and didn’t even know what “I” wanted anymore, because my life was all about everyone else.


A WORLD OF FEAR

I ended up getting used and hurt by people. Sure, people wanted me around, but it was not for who I was, it was for the benefits that they got from what I did for them. They didn’t really like me. I didn’t like myself, and I was denying many of my feelings. I ended up in a bad place - not knowing who I was or what I wanted.

Even the thought of anything negative happening seemed so sad and scary and different from what I was striving for that I was constantly living in fear of the bad things might happen (Life spoiler-alert: Bad things do happen, and worrying about them doesn’t make them any easier to deal with when they do. It just creates stress and anxiety worrying over way more bad things than ever actually happen.) I had worked hard to get rid of the dark aspects of my personality and create a world of light, but what I ended up creating was a world of fear.

Clearly, light did not equal happiness. Being unbalanced, even toward light, was not a good thing for me. See the next post in this series is about an imbalance toward the dark side here.

@creatingkj

See the other parts of my A BALANCED PERSONALITY series:
PART 1: WHY LIGHT DOESN’T EQUAL HAPPY
PART 2: GOING WITH DARKNESS
PART 3: FINDING BALANCE