lose the training wheels

I've noticed that sometimes it is just impossible to really express to someone else what you think or feel. That's ok I guess because at least we know... don't we?
I've been thinking a lot about being honest with myself. It seems like it would be hard to avoid full disclosure with yourself. When I write it, it almost seems ridiculous. The thing is, there is a huge difference between knowing everything that we do or say and knowing how it makes us feel or why we do or say it.
When I first started thinking about writing this, I wanted to talk about how important it is to be honest with yourself. The more I thought about it though, the more I realized the difficulty of it. Don't get me wrong, I think it is vital. I think though that before I can go on and on about being true to yourself and all of that, I need to address what that actually means.
I guess what I've learned over the last few years is that we train ourselves to think and act in certain ways. To some extent we have to do that, I get that. But, sometimes all that training gets in the way of fully experiencing things. If we only have our prefabricated responses we never actually stop to think about anything. We never question anything. We never develop opinions of anything. And often, we ignore any signs that there might be something going on within ourselves that would go beyond the training.
I see this kind of living sort of like riding a bike with training wheels. It is still fun, but you're never really one of the big kids until you can get around the block without them. You're never really living if you don't take the training wheels off your mind, at least from time to time. What exactly do I mean by that? I mean that you have to be upfront with yourself. You have to ask yourself if the things you've been doing are still working for you. You have to think about things that have happened and what they really mean to you. You have to try some new things and get outside of your comfort zone a bit. You have to evaluate what makes you uncomfortable. I'm not saying you need to abandon your principles, not at all. I am saying though, that it is important to even question the fundamentals sometimes. If the things you believe really are true and right(for you anyway), you'll feel even better about them after some good reflection.
I bring all of this up because I know that I can't possibly be the only one out there with issues swirling around my head that I ought to have confronted years ago. I think it is far too easy to hide the hard things from yourself. It can be hard to bring out the truth for yourself, but it is rewarding. It is liberating to start understanding yourself, just like it was liberating to lose the training wheels.