How to be free from yourself
Since I became aware of my own thoughts, at the tender age of 9 after staring at my West Indian cherry tree for too long in the backyard in Antigua, I have struggled with what I have identified as the “second voice”, but what manifests as fear. This second voice, or the fear which I have experienced since then, comes and goes in waves, but has consistently masked itself as logic, or what it convinces me is “sensible”.
The voice says “Don’t go into the deep water, there are sharks there!” or “Don’t make small talk with strangers, they might be serial killers”. For much of my life, I have convinced myself that these thoughts are logical, that they can happen, and as such, I deem them as “sensible”. In reality, shark attacks only happen to 0.000026% of the population, and only 0.00000025% of the population are serial killers, so why should this matter to me? In a similar way, the inner voice would skew probability against me – what percentage of people would mess this situation up? And it would always find some logical way to go against what I really wanted. The inner voice, it always deals in don’ts (negatives), and for a very long time, it always won.
The power of positive thinking is something I have only recently re-discovered. As a kid, after years of experiencing racism growing up, and being targeted for being ethnically Indian, people would often say “You’re Indian, you can never do…” and you fill in the blank. This forced me, from a quite young age, to believe in myself when nobody else (besides my parents) would. It forced me to push to be the best version of myself when everyone else doubted me. I would convince myself in these moments, after any bullying streak, that I could do it, whatever it is they threw at me, no matter how big or how small.
Rediscovering this as an adult has been a difficult process of soul-searching and combatting this “sensible” voice which I have come to hear so regularly from the back of my mind. It has been a process of actively seeking out the unsensible, and developing an aversion to the "sensible", with the fact that there are people who have defeated unfathomable odds. People win the lottery, people work and land their “dream” jobs, people make their imagination a reality. It has been the act of BELIEF and it has been a difficult one.
Believing has funded me an education at Oxford, with two Masters' degrees, an MBA and an MSc in Economics for Development under a Rhodes Scholarship. Believing has got me a job in the IFC in Washington D.C., a company and a city I have dreamt about being in my whole life. Believing has allowed me to be more free with myself, and open to new opportunities in ways that for many years, I forgot were possible. Who knows what believing will bring next for me – who knows what it will bring for you?
While I am never certain of what the next step is in terms of my career or where I want to be, I will remain forever certain about the one thing I want to stay with me forever, that is, an aversion to the sensible, the act of believing, even when every bone in my body is telling me not to. I hope you do the same.
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