The Human Need To Rebel

In my lifetime I have lived in various places and met many people. And through these experiences and encounters I have noticed an interesting pattern of behavior. That is the human need to rebel.  Perhaps you too have noticed something along those lines as well. You see, I believe that we as humans must rebel at some point in our lives. In some ways it seems like it has become necessarily for us to rebel as a way for us to regain our freedom. 

It has been in my experience that more often than not, we as human beings say that we are free to do as we wish, but we rarely do just what it is that we wish to do. For example, I spent many years of my life wondering just why people do what they do and why things happen as they do. What I found is that no one could really give me the answers that I was looking for. So I was stuck in this big circle of "why?".  At first I was so incredibly torn between understanding people and understanding how the world operates, how it works. What should I do with my life? Where will I go? What will I be? To this day there are times I wonder about these things. Will I actually amount to anything? Will I actually be able to help people and be the woman that I want to be? That I know is inside. Though this in it of itself could be a completely different post and is becoming a bit of a tangent.  Would I be a psychologist or  scientist? So as you can imagine when I discovered that it was possible to do both simultaneously I was beyond ecstatic!

My point is that as human beings we want to feel that we have the freedom to do what we want to do and be who we want to be, who we really are.

Yet, we often seem, I'm including myself in here too, to believe that we are not allowed to be who we want to be, do what we want to do. It still blows my mind that we claim to be free and yet we so readily restrict ourselves. You see here is what I believe:

We feel this need to rebel in order to regain our freedom and feel like we must be something  that we aren't deep down. 

Now this is not your fault. It's not anyone's fault. We have all had past pains both externally and internally inflicted. As the saying goes, "You are your own worst critic."  We have conditioned ourselves to believe that we aren't capable or deserving  to be what we always wanted to be. Holding in all of these painful and difficult emotions for so long builds up, much like a dam holds back water, until it can no longer be held back. We become exhausted emotionally and  eventually we can no longer hold it back.  This gives way to what many would call being "rebellious". 

I believe this is when we hit rock bottom. From there two things could happen:

1. Remain at rock bottom and never move forward.
2. Move past it and become the better versions of ourselves.

I wouldn't really suggest option one as it leads to a life of inaction and a seemingly constant victim mentality. For example, when we sit and think to ourselves, "Can't I ever get break?" or "Nothing good ever happens to me!" Everyone experiences some moments of self pity every now and then, but as human beings I don't believe that we were meant to simply sit around and mope. I'm sure you too have met people like this before. Think back to how you felt around that person. Were you energized? How would you describe converstations with them? Meaningful? Stimulating?

In my experiences interactions with people who choose option one were

• Unstimulating
• Frustrating
• Boring
• And frankly, exhausting

That is to say, that when I have previously engaged with people who have this kind of victim mentality I felt like I was doing everything and that the person was taking from me and not sharing. 

To give you an example from my own life I had a roommate last year who never really had the pleasure of receiving a man's attention romantically.  At first I felt bad for her because I knew what it was like to want to have a man's attention and not get it. I understood how much that could hurt. Now, I have not had many romantic experiences with men. In fact I have only ever had one relationship and am currently dating a man (who is absolutely amazing by the way!). As I continued  to live with her over the next year, I noticed that she never really gave out an energy. There wasn't anything to respond to! In fact, she would often tell myself and another roommate about how she thought a guy was cute, but that she couldn't  talk to him because he was either gay or taken.  As a result of this she seemed to develop this "men don't like me because of my weight" attitude. I believe this made her very bitter inside and so she shut herself off to the world. I later found out that she told one of our other roommates that it was surprising that I had ever had a boyfriend because I was so mean! I was kind of like "What the hell?! You hardly ever said anything to me!" Now, I do understand that this may be out of jealousy. To be honest I was so upset that I opened up to the man I have been talking to about it. Though this is turning more into a bit of a rant-like tangent.

The point in sharing the above story with you was to show how option one has a tendency of leading a life out of fear and ultimately a life of inaction.

Option two is much more difficult because it involves taking a look at ourselves and being brutally honest with ourselves. We have to dig deeper than we may have ever had to dig in our lives. It's much scarier than option one and requires that we acknowledge and thank ourselves for having the fear and then face our fears to make our own emotional breakthroughs. So that we can grow. Furthermore, option two gives us a way to regain our freedom! However, it isn't the easy fix and many people would rather pursue option one since it is much easier, much safer.