BlushSpirals

I grew up in a very cult-like youth group. When I was twelve years old I became part of a church where the ultimate position was to be glorified as one of the pastor’s twelve disciples. That was the end game.

Fear was instilled in me at a young age. Fear that there was good and evil. If you didn’t do the right thing, it was evil. For a long time this shaped my perception of reality into seeing things in purely black and white.

Adolescence is when our brains begin forming many of the beliefs that follow us into adulthood. Psychology shows that trauma can anchor emotional responses to the stage of life in which it happened. In many ways, I think that influenced me.

Seeing the world in black and white shaped much of my reality well into adulthood. If I drank, I believed I was a bad person. If I smoked, I was a bad person. If I cursed, I was a bad person. The list goes on and on.

Eventually I accepted what I believed was my fate. If I was already a bad person, then I might as well indulge in whatever I wanted. Yet even then I carried immense shame and guilt over things that don’t actually define a person.

The truth is that there is no such thing as someone who is entirely good or entirely bad. Yet the religious environment I grew up in emphasized that you must never be lukewarm. You had to be on fire for Jesus. Anything less was unacceptable.

That belief reinforced the idea that life is black and white.

It wasn’t until college that I began to understand something different. I started realizing that you can read between the lines and that not everything is as it appears.

I began seeing the world in shades of gray, though it often felt like I was balancing somewhere in the middle of morality.

Then something unusual happened.

During my first episode of psychosis, it felt as though the psychological lenses I had always used to interpret the world suddenly disappeared. In that moment it felt like I could see reality differently—not just in black and white, or even gray, but in a full spectrum of colors.

As I recovered, those lenses slowly returned and I became a normal functioning person again according to society’s standards.

Over time I experienced several more episodes. And with each recovery something interesting happened. Even when I was no longer in psychosis, the rigid lenses I once used to interpret reality began to soften.

Now the world feels less like black and white and more like a spectrum of colors.

I sometimes compare it to vocabulary. A toddler can only describe the world with the few words they know. But as they grow and learn more language, their ability to describe reality becomes more expansive.

I believe our beliefs work in a similar way.

When you grow up seeing the world through a particular set of psychological lenses, it is only natural to find your community among people who see the world the same way. If you see life in shades of blue, you will naturally gravitate toward others who see the world in shades of blue as well.

Being surrounded by people who see in red might make you feel like an outsider.

But something interesting is happening in our generation. More and more people are realizing that you don’t have to remain confined to one color. Instead of choosing between blue or red, we can begin blending perspectives together to create entirely new shades.

Understanding this might be the bridge to our future.

Right now the world often feels divided into competing colors. One group insists the world is clearly blue. Another insists it is clearly red. Meanwhile other cultures and nations interpret reality through entirely different colors and claim their view to be the truth.

And this often leads to fear of the unknown.

When every color of light is blended together, it produces white. Yet many people are afraid of seeing reality in its fullest form. It feels safer to remain within the familiar shade of color we already understand.

Light can be intimidating. It can even feel overwhelming. Plato once described something similar in his Allegory of the Cave—where people spend their lives watching shadows on a wall, only to be blinded when they finally step into the light of reality.

But what if blending perspectives didn’t lead to chaos, but to peace?

What if instead of competing over which color is correct, we learned to see how each color contributes to a larger picture?

Right now the world is filled with competing psychological lenses—each convinced their truth is the ultimate truth.

But maybe truth was never meant to belong to a single perspective.

Maybe it only becomes visible when enough perspectives are willing to stand in the same light.