The ESCAPE/WITHDRAWAL Character

Ahh the old old pattern again arising within me. I call this the escape/withdrawal character. I truly believed that this quality/”skill” that I have perfected is something that served me good, but now I see it’s not really so.

This character comes into play when there is judgment/seeing faults/shortcomings with the people, community, or situations towards which relations are being formed. This judgement accumulates very slowly and is growing to the point where something has to be done, either has to be expressed and addressed because it can no longer be suppressed or I simply have to do what I have always done - withdraw and escape following the thought “it’s time to move on”.

It is a very convenient existence, but of course, we have to consider that for this work a choice must be available and the means to execute this choice. It’s not so for majority of people in this world, they cannot escape their conditions because the system does not provide sufficient access to resources. It’s the elite’s luxury - move to another country when the taxes get to high, change a job when boss gets too cranky, rent another apartment when the neighbors are not very friendly, switch the partners when “honeymoon” is over.

I completely agree with the statement that the poor are much closer to the actual reality because they are forced to see it and live it while the rest can still hide with money. This might be changing now because reality has a way of seeping in and driving one crazy if resistance to face self-dishonesties is too great. The increasing numbers of psychiatric patients in the western world is proving the point.

So the point I am making and setting as a reminder for myself is that when things get tough, when I am facing parts of myself that I resist or am disgusted with, it does not mean I have to run away, I don’t have to move on to some other thing and forget the past, I do not have to activate my escape and withdrawal character but I can actually say no more and take self-responsibility no matter how inconvenient it is.

The example of this pattern came up just the other day when I was browsing the steemit platform still trying to understand how it works. Soon I have come across some blog which was tackling some philosophical issue. Under the post I have noticed an endless list of comments and was very surprised by the popularity of the blog. Some comments were cool, trying to analyse the issue from different angles but bigger part of comments were people asking and even begging for likes and steem power from the person who wrote the blog. It turned out the guy has a big wallet and thus a lot of power on the platform. So this is what has caused a reaction within me, immediately I judged the community and the whole platform as being no better than the current structures of hierarchy we have in our system.
So basically I can see that I have this tendency to jump to conclusions very quickly and this is where the escapism/withdrawal character usually activates, immediately accessing the possibility of the choice of simply leaving the space rather than facing and understanding my reactions and doing more research to understand how the platform works in more detail.

When looking self-honestly at myself in this situation I saw that there was a desire to also collect likes and increase my account and kind of becoming overly focused on that part more than actually being focused on making quality contribution by producing quality content, connecting with others for real, commenting and engaging in real conversations. Instead I was like a child throwing a tantrum inside myself that things should just be given to me without effort. Interesting stuff