Self-Reliance VS. Love, Connection, and Union

So I thought of something very interesting this week. Self-reliance and union are on two opposite ends of a spectrum. Self-reliance is the idea of not needing anyone else to provide for you and union is the idea of different parties coming together to act as one. Neither is what humans can actually do to its fullest extent because we were made to balance the two. We need to be able to stand on our own enough to help balance out those you are connected to and we need to be connected with others enough so that we can be balanced out in our marriages, relationships within our families, and friendships. 

When I think about being self-reliant, I think of not needing anyone and not needing anything other than myself. When I started to dissect the term, I thought of being financially independent and able to keep my emotional stability without a therapist. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought about the weaknesses of human beings and how much we rely on things. As a species, we require interaction with other humans to maintain mental and emotional health, we need air to breath and food to eat, and the whole reason for each of our births was the joining of two people that worked together to create us. Self-reliance has its place in each of our lives but it can’t be taken too literally. We are and have been dependent on unions or connections since forever. 

I am using the terms, connection, unions, and love interchangeably because they are the same thing. The amount of love you have for a person can be measured by how much you are connected or united with them. The equality of these terms are important to recognize because we need to think about love as more than just a feeling, we need to think of it as physical, this is what we would call a connection. This would make sense as the opposite of self-reliance because self-reliance is needing nothing other than yourself while love, connection, and union are the idea of being one with everything around you in a physical, mental, and spiritual sense to work together, live, and thrive. But we aren’t all one thing, we are individual humans on a singular planet in a solar system in one out of 100 billion galaxies. And even if we were all one thing, nothing in this universe is perfect, we can take it to a smaller scale though. No one person is perfect so no two people would have a combined level that equaled perfection. This means that our unions would need other unions to balance them. That’s what our relationships do, we balance each other out. One friend will always be pulling you to be more kind while you always pull them to speak their mind more. Both of you are not perfect, but your imperfections together start to balance each other out. 

This is a spectrum that is important to see in all of our relationships. In my past blogg I was talking about how I am having a hard time with reality right now and I now realize that it is because I am leaning too far towards the self-reliant end of the spectrum. I used to lean too far towards union, love, and connection and I was more anxious and afraid to live my life the way I feel I should. Now that I have seen this mindset that I need to balance within myself I feel more in control of myself and the relationships I am in. I know that I need others in my life, but I also know that boundaries within those relationships are important to my personal development and keeping my own identity.