Who Is Your Real Enemy?

Hello! I hope you're having a beautiful week.
This past weekend, I learned something about myself. I'm going to share it here with you for the chance that it might help you understand yourself better too.

I truly believe that it's okay to be imperfect yet always working towards being better. I know this and I thought that I understood what accepting myself means. But this weekend, whilst having a difficult yet wondrous conversation with some people, I came to this dawning realisation that I still have a ways to go when it comes to accepting myself.
I saw that although I don't berate nor punish myself for making mistakes, I do feel guilty for what I cannot overcome - my impatience, my procrastination, my selfishness and so many more. This guilt isn't something I consciously feel - in fact, I wasn't even aware that I had this feeling - but when I examined my reactions to the people I love, I realised that what kept holding me back from being able to cultivate the wonderful relationships I want... was my defensiveness.
When you're aware of what you are not good at, when you're aware of your weaknesses, you become extremely sensitive about them. I realised that the reason it was hard for me to be patient and really listen in a conversation / disagreement / argument with someone I love, was because I couldn't disassociate my hang ups from the actual topic of the conversation. Whenever I reacted with impatience or frustration, it was because I did feel like my flaws were under attack. It felt personal even when it wasn't. This was interesting for me to realise and even harder to admit.
One of the key practices is "Don't take things personally," and as you can tell, I keep discovering layers upon layers of what not taking things personally means. Because we cannot convince ourselves to not be sensitive, we cannot try to not be defensive. I mean, we can, but it's always going to be a constant struggle. We have to truly be not sensitive. We have to truly feel like there's nothing about ourselves that we need to defend. Pretending (even to ourselves) that we don't take something personally doesn't work - that's why we end up reacting badly even when we tell ourselves not to.

Why is it that even when we try so hard, it's still so difficult to be the best version of ourselves, especially around the people we love?
The answer is so simple it boggles me - it's because we ourselves cannot accept our own flaws. Whenever we have even the tiniest judgement of ourselves, whenever we carry even the tiniest bit of guilt, it makes us very hard to communicate and have a relationship with. Because instead of focusing on solving the problem, we are too busy trying to explain ourselves.
It's why conversations escalate into an arguments.
Instead of listening properly or trying to understand a situation to move forward, we're held back by our need for some sort of validation of how good and capable we are. It's like we fear people thinking badly of us, so we need to explain and justify. But if we're a 100% honest with ourselves, it's because we fear people thinking what we already think about ourselves.
So much of the blame and responsibility we put upon the people we love is actually us reacting to the fact that it's hard for us to figure outwhy we feel bad, why we feel guilty, why we feel judged and why we feel unsupported.
Often... the truth is because we are unable to accept the darkest parts of ourselves, and we need the people we love to be okay with those parts, so that maybe we can accept ourselves too.
As we grow, we learn more and more about ourselves. And we begin to realise that the most important lessons always point back at us. Nobody can solve our issues, nobody can give us happiness, nobody can make us feel less judged or more confident. All that work... belongs to us and us alone. It sounds bleak when I write it out like that, but you know what? It feels so darn good. It's nice to be able to say "Hey, ok. I'm me and that's okay. And I'm okay too, to work on myself."
Have a wonderful wek, and be well!