Tabitha is from the German speaking part of Switzerland (near Thun), but has lived in Geneva for almost eight years. She is one of the frankest persons I know with this exceptional flair of candidness.
With regard to her quest after what’s real, this is what she says she’s been discovering recently:
“Lately, I am learning to take myself seriously. The process for this is somewhat simple: I ask myself, “what would I do if there were no-one else around that has an opinion about anything I ever do?”
For the longest time growing up I would give far more weight to what others thought (or even worse, what I thought they thought) I should or shouldn’t do than what I found to be relevant for myself. For example, I didn’t believe that I could possibly be good at arts, just because my Mum always called my younger sister the family artist. Looking back, it looks incredibly stupid, but for years such thinking became like a custom-built prison for my mind, as I tried hard to fit in and find my place in life.
Today I am learning to put some distance between other’s opinions and my own ability to judge. It’s good to ask for advice but in the end, I need to take my own decisions because after all, they are just opinions. The whole process started out because I felt that God had for me than what I tried to construct for myself to make sense of my own life. So I prayed that He would show me… and then it just went on from there. No big revelations just a steadily growing understanding of myself.
If I think about what has changed, I would say it is not so much what I do but how it feels; today I realise that when I do something I waste no minute thinking about whether it’s good enough in someone else’s opinion but rather what I think about it, and whether I think it needs improvement or altering. Life is so much more fun this way.”
Surprised by the landscape 