We live in a society that teaches us that we will be saved.
This isn’t usually a teaching we explicitly propagate, or even teach on purpose at all. In fact, I hear it frequently being explicitly contradicted.
Yet we worship deities that save us. Most of our folklore is characterized by someone who saves the protagonist, or even all of a society or humanity. (Such as fairy tales, for example.) We tend to place an astonishing amount of weight on the notion of “finding someone” without putting very much effort into discussing what that “someone” is supposed to contribute to our lives, or what we are supposed to contribute to theirs. Families are sometimes held together by the notion that they’re the ones who stick by you when things get tough.
The undercurrent that we need someone else to save us, to stick by us, to put up with our craziness and love us anyway, runs through our lives everyday.
It’s not entirely wrong. Humans are social animals. We do tend to need some form of social life, some support and love.
That doesn’t mean we need to be saved. In fact, in my experience, even the subconscious expectation that I will be saved by some external force makes it that much harder for me to overcome obstacles.
I had to learn that no one can save me but myself.
I don’t mean that I have to fight my battles all alone. But if I need someone’s help, it’s much more effective if I can articulate to them what I need. Even if that person can’t necessarily offer me what I need, the understanding of what I need makes them more effective at supporting me where they can.
As long as I seek to be as self-aware as possible without being clouded by what I think should be, no one can know me anywhere near as well as I know myself. Certainly, some things are clearer from the outside looking in. Sometimes I don’t become aware of some behavior of mine until it’s pointed out to me by a friend. External observations are helpful. But those behavioral observations alone are not me. If I am the sum of my past, my behavior and my thoughts, emotions and beliefs, then only a portion of that is observable from the outside. If I ever claim that someone knows me better than I know myself, I am either woefully unaware of my own behavior, or willfully ignoring a very large part of myself (or, most likely, joking).
So, being the person who knows myself best, it stands to reason that I am the best person to work out what I need to remain adrift; the best person to gauge my own limits; the best person to identify what I want and what I need.
This may sound like common sense. But it took me a good twenty-five years to work it out.