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Universidad de Guadalajara

Centro universitario de ciencias sociales y humanidades

Lic. En docencia del inglés como lengua extranjera

Academic writing

Professor: Ricardo Zepeda

Christian Daniel Sánchez Rivera

Code 213558191
Introduction

We human beings have lived in this environment without questioning what the meaning of

reality is. We have trusted too much in our five senses to try to understand more about the

surroundings of this world, and hence we believe that what it is seen and felt is what exists.

But what would happen if everything we know is just one of the many layers of a big

spectrum of many different truths? This is what Socrates stated in his Allegory of the Cave.

In his text, he stated that our senses do not always communicate what they are supposed to;

the way we perceive the world may deceive and blind us from a greater existence.

The purpose of this writing is to talk about one experience I had where I questioned

myself about knowledge that I believe was truth because I was taught so, how that affected

my mental state, the way I accepted this new reality and finally how I got out of my cave.

The awakening

Throughout my life I have lived many phases in which I have gotten out of a lot of caves,

and the more I advanced and learnt, the harder it was to keep searching for the truth. One of

those experiences was when I had to accept that I was in pain.

Two years ago, I encouraged myself to attend to a psychologist and find the origin of my

negative feelings. Fortunately I was able to meet a psychologist. I remembered that in our

first session, he made me talk about the problems which I wanted to solve, and he proceeded

to make me told him about my background and how I was raised with all the possible details.

I said to him that when I was 6 months old, my mother had left me, and for years I denied

that this situation had had any negative consequences on me. I did not want to admit that the

way I behave was the repercussion of being in negation for so long; I desired to ignore how
disturbed I was because that was part of the comfort zone that used to keep me ignorant from

the reality that I did not want to see.

The bottomless pit

After I finished telling the psychologist my whole personal story, he said to me that the

process to heal will be something not easy to achieve, and it even might not make me feel

any better. Little I cared of how arduous the process was going to be. The first step I had to

go through was to admit the abandonment of my mother and that that desertion had nothing

to do with my own self. This first stage was very educational because it taught me that in my

attempt to protect myself I was hurting myself more than anyone ever had in my life. And I

even realized that most of our problems come because we do not want to accept the agony

we are going through. And all of that was not my mistake; the reason why most of us do not

wish to deal with those feelings is very simple. Our culture has made us think that accepting

our problems is just another way to show weakness. When I realized about this truth, for the

first time in a long time, I could cry and let my anger go. I had started to see a different kind

of light that could provide me with happiness.

Purgatory

Although the idea of recognizing what troubled me was very , in theory, very straightforward,

the healing process ended up being extremely slow and painful. The first thing I had to do

was to be honest with my feelings; that meant that I had to stop pretending that everything

was pleasing. In the beginning I got carried away with these new feelings, and I started to go

to the extreme. My friends and family noticed all these changes and started to worry about

me because they were not used to see me in that state. This caused me a lot of trouble; the
obedient person I was began to be more aggressive and assertive with whoever who tried to

mess with me. Unfortunately, although I was happier with myself, I also commenced to hurt

people I cared about and I get to wondered if my happiness was more important than my

beloved ones. That troubled me for a while until I understood that my extremism was causing

me all these problems. It was not about caring too much about me or somebody else; it was

about finding a middle ground. It took me a lot of practice to balance the assertiveness and

my calmness; my mind was a storm of emotions, at that time, that I had to learn how to tame.

Although I am able to handle them better, there are times in which I get loose of them, but I

always try to remember that one greatest enemy is oneself.

A new damn

After getting out of that cave called extremism in which I had been in pain for too long, I felt

better with the world and myself. I do not see the world the same way. I understood that there

is no such thing as good or bad, just ideologies that are extremist. I am in a better mood

because now I am able to control the spectrum of my emotions. However, although I feel

better, I would not recommend this to anyone who does not want to get out of the comfort

zone, and I would not force anyone to go into this; you cannot force anyone to see things that

they do not desire to discover. No matter how much that would help that person to become a

little bit freer from this reality. We have to respect other people desires no matter if from our

point they look wrong because at the end, every ideology is just a matter of preferences.

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