like...ow.

I'm reading this book which is basically about financial planning, but is kind of a yoga-book in disguise at the same time. Each chapter has a set of evolving questions, modified by the subject of the current chapter. I've only gotten through two chapters so far; the first is about getting to know how you first came to conceptualize money, and to get a better understanding of how that has influenced how you think about it now. Fine, all well and good, I copied down the questions and answered them.

The next chapter is about 'suffering' (in the Buddhic sense, like one of the Noble Truths suffering), and getting to know how whatever suffering you might feel might stem from the experiences and thoughts explored in the last chapter. So I get to the questions of this chapter, type them the modifications to the previous chapter's (in blue this time), and go about answering them.

And then, by whatever intuitive manner the blob in my skull works, I realized something, and it hurt like heartbreak for a moment. It's hard to explain without, well, I'm not sure I could if I tried, but nonetheless I realized something that's been causing me fear and suffering for years. Going through experiences and memories of mine, I realized several of them were of people striking out to make their lives better, or happier somehow, and that only leading to miserable amounts of hard work, seemingly pointless sacrifice, and never quite achieving the goal they set out for, if they even got close. And so I'd unconsciously been laboring under this fucked up assumption that that's the only way things could be for me, as well. I mean, I can say I realized that, and might've even guessed at that before, but it's another to have the structure of an essay with evidence staring at me, just from those questions I was so blythely answering like a myspace survey.

This whole thing isn't a question of blame, or excuses, of course, but of releasing unconscious chains and weights that I've weighed myself down with - of actually removing blame and excuses, and taking responsibility for my self. The question is, how to move forward, once I get over the pain a realization like that brings.