One of my friends is a screenwriter. She's been pitching a script for ten years. She's gotten close a number of times and then it falls apart. I was talking with her about it yesterday. She was frustrated. She said that either Hollywood is a difficult place to get a movie made, or there's something wrong about her that's making it not happen.
I said it's the first one. Very few movies get made. The second option of something being wrong about her was a fantasy.
Sometimes we blame ourselves as a default. We automatically feel that something is bad or broken about us. Not that we did something in particular that caused a difficult outcome, but something essential about who we are brought us grief.
No one is bad, evil, or a black hole. We may have been trained to think that way through our programming as we grew up. But who we are doesn't determine our experiences.
We can try to blame who we are for our difficult circumstances as a way to graft on a feeling of control in a powerless situation. But life happens to us. Not as rewards or punishments, but life.
The other night I woke around two am with vibrating sensations in my body. They went along with the thought that what I believed I was in this world (writer, clutter buster, artist, boyfriend, liberal, spiritual, etc.) and the multitudes of things I had to do to maintain these things in my life, we're actually not true. I was the breathing in my body. I was the life force flowing through me.
I felt a great pressure drop away. I saw how exhausting it was to think I had to maintain all those pieces of me.The truth is, they were maintained by life. They were things life had given me. I felt freer to enjoy what I was given.