During the turbulent 24 hours I went through since canceling my professional commitment, I found myself sitting in the front row of a particularly disturbing personal cinema: the cinema of my mind.
Our brain is a survival machine, and when it detects a threat (like damage to our reputation or someone else’s anger), it doesn’t just broadcast a warning – it starts writing horror scripts.
The Mind’s Horror Scripts
For hours, I listened to the voice in my head describing the future in terrifying detail: how I would lose this job completely, how no organization would ever want to hire me again following this decision, and how this professional stain would follow me forever.
The most deceptive part about this unreliable narrator is that our body believes it. The anxiety I felt wasn’t theoretical; it was physical, real, and heavy. I experienced all these dreadful scenarios as if they had already happened in reality.
The Morning After: Meeting Reality
But then came the morning after. I woke up, the sun was shining, the birds were chirping, and suddenly I realized something amazing: none of it actually happened, even though I did lose the job at that specific place.
The sky didn’t fall. I am still here. My career was not erased. All those catastrophes took place entirely inside my head. This realization is one of the core discoveries of mindfulness practice: we can observe our thoughts, recognize how frightening and convincing they are, and still – choose not to believe them.
Forgive the dramatic analogy I’m about to present, but it reminded me of a wonderful scene from the timeless movie Forrest Gump. Lieutenant Dan—who lost both legs in the war instead of dying as a true hero like his ancestors before him, and who was furiously angry at God for ruining his life—stands on the mast of Forrest’s boat in the middle of a severe storm at sea. He looks up and defiantly screams at the heavens:
“You call this a storm?!”
“Is that the best you can do?!”
The storm passed—the one outside and the one in Lieutenant Dan’s heart—and as he sits smiling on the deck, Forrest narrates: “I think that’s the day Lieutenant Dan made his peace with God.”
Now, I’m not comparing the severity of our storms… but I draw from this beautiful scene the understanding that when we are willing to stay with the storm, to let it scream its scream, quiet follows.
The Unexpected Reward of Truth
Not only did the catastrophe not materialize, but for me, reality actually worked out much better than I could have imagined or planned.
Following the cancellation and letting go of the attempt to “dance at two weddings,” a new alternative emerged that is much better for me.
As I mentioned, the manager wrote to me that our paths had parted ways, and that is truly completely fine. Really.
Sometimes we create the opportunities to let go of things whose time in our lives has passed.
I gained an understanding of the power of integrity, and the knowledge that there is another type of storm I can safely navigate. (This is, of course, while making a commitment to myself to do my absolute best never to be in a situation where I break a commitment in the future!)
We Are Not the Voice in Our Head
In his book The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer explains that the first step to inner freedom is realizing that the incessant voice in our head is not us. If we are capable of noticing that frightened voice producing horror scripts, it means we are simply the quiet “observer” listening to it. The moment we detach our identification from this unreliable narrator, we stop being a captive audience to its fears and can finally experience true peace.
The Bottom Line
When we stop trying to manipulate reality out of fear, and simply choose to tell the truth (even when it hurts or is embarrassing), reality usually catches us in ways our frightened minds could never have predicted.
The voice in our head will probably keep talking. It will continue to generate anxieties, scenarios, and fears – that’s how it’s built. But the moment we understand it is just an unreliable narrator, we stop being its captive audience. And that, ultimately, is the true meaning of freedom.
More about this voice in the next article.
Mindful Education 