Mass Projecting InSecurities

“Far & wide, Canadians often seem to have some iteration of an inferiority complex. 

It can be seen in our Artists, in our Leaders, our parents and children, in our politics, our business, our schools and our mental health crisis.

We do not recognize greats who think they are so great. We don’t trust smart people who think they are smart. We don’t rely upon strong people who know they are strong. And so, we have been conditioned to collectively condition each other into knee capping ourselves so that somebody else might tell us we are good. This is part of what I refer to when I say that Canada has Stockholm Syndrome. 

Anyone who deviates will variably be attacked and torn down to lower levels, like a compromised immune system misfiring at white blood cells. We demand credentials, yelp reviews and two bent knees beneath a lowered head to consider you for the position.

We say “Don’t be so full of yourself” when that is exactly what we are and ought to be.

But, what if we got it backwards? What if we are all great? What if people profit off of this fact being witheld from our awareness and the infighting it creates?

We think it more realistic to degrade ourselves and assume failure and it has, does, and threatens to continue to create that reality. It is only realistic in the reality it functions to make. We degrade ourselves and each other and so, we are degrading. 

So it is with dire importance that I tell you, you are great, we are. Simply. Fkn. Awesome. I love us. I believe in us. I believe we will do great things in our lifetime. I need us to smarten up and know that and cool it with all that other stuff. We’re just, we’re great. We’re getting better. Our potential for improved states and outcomes is all but boundless if we turn this around like I know that we can.

I love you.

I think you are great.

❤”

X recoiled in the internal contradiction between how she felt when she wrote it and how she felt reading it after having been betrayed by the insecurities of yet another person she had been deluded and desperate to trust. An inferiority complex ravaged the nation, no doubt. It seemed, however, that her expression of love and attention to the better in humanity was confounded by disgust with the worst of it. It seemed that her gratuitous patience only functioned to enable that which she extended it to. Her contrary occasional intolerance spurned it forth as well. She was stuck. No attention she could find to give to the matter seemed to help at all, as with any other matter, she felt helpless, compelled and outnumbered by the masses, misdirected to take their insecurities out on whosoever dare to disturb them. Her love, recycled into hatred and spat back upon her offerings. For her own misdirected attempts in the past, it was getting harder to maintain that she deserved any better.

The next entry followed in form, a cacophony of congruent contradictions;

“I’ve been incredibly insecure.

I was so insecure at a point that I couldn’t dance or dress myself or speak without fear that I was being offensive or apropriative.

I embodied these insecurities so much that I projected all of the judgements I ever experienced onto the world – as though to prove I cared.

I was offended all the time.

It was a balancing act into a negative feedback loop that eventually made me quite offensive.

I made others insecure.

I gave of my energy of consideration to how I or others could be disliked and thus became rather unlikeable.

Being insecure, I became unsafe.

If someone else “caused” me or others to feel unsafe, I would tell everyone, including when that person was me.

I made a very unsafe world for myself.

It made others feel unsafe.”

X felt like both the writer and recipient, often. Everything they had done to her reverberated in how she felt about herself. How she felt about herself echoed in how she felt about others. How she felt manifest in how she behaved. How she behaved animated how she had been treated. How she had been treated was a human rights crisis, for which she took the blame, being the only apparent transparent evidence remaining, still screaming, she’d be the hanged man.