for a long time...
One thing that I thought about a lot was this:
Life places us where it will but what kind of human beings we are or become depends solely on ourselves.
Life-circumstances-decisions....some, of our making, and others, made for us by others...all play a role in where we find ourselves.
How do we react or respond to these?
---We can coast along, unthinkingly.....
---We can push down disturbing. questioning thoughts so as not to upset the place-space we find ourselves in.....
---We can react...respond...to the situations we find ourselves in...this would include new situations and people, or, it may include situations that are disturbing to us, or people we really would rather not have anything to do with.....
How we deal with these...how we behave...will tell us a lot about ourselves....and we do need to know about ourselves because this is something that keeps cropping up.
So, the questions, in fact, are:
What kind of human being are we?
What kind of human being would we be?
What kind of human being do we want to become?
It's no use, really, trying to reach out to others because willy-nilly we hope they will echo what we feel....hope they will reassure us of our worthiness....
The litmus test of our response--our very own individual response--has to be how we feel about ourselves...whether we appreciate ourselves...whether we feel worthy inside of ourselves...worthy enough to deal with the circumstances and places and people we find ourselves with/in... and all of these go into moulding our human-ness...
The thing is that at the end of all this we stand alone......so we need to become strong enough to stand alone...