Hanging inherited paintings
My mom inherited an ugly painting from her mom. It hung in the living room, and visitors would comment on how it felt wrong. But she kept it there for sentimental reasons.
One day, when she took it out to be reframed, they found the artist’s signature and date written underneath the old frame. Turns out the painting had been hanging upside-down this whole time. Turned right-side-up, it looked much better.
Kind of like beliefs. We inherit pictures of how to think and act, and tend to keep them as-is, even if they’re problematic.
Your mother always said, “be careful”, teaching you to live in fear. Your father had a terrible temper, teaching you to not share your thoughts. Your first major breakup taught you that you don’t deserve love.
This is the interior design of your mind — your internal environment. Take these paintings out under a bright light to be reframed. When you remove the frame and flip them upside-down, you can make sure they’re hanging the right way. Or decide to throw them away.
This is my third comment and I'll leave at that. Hanging a painting upside-down and thinking it's ugly reveals visual illiteracy. And using that metaphor to make an argument in a world cemented by words - the usual modus operandi by many western intellectuals is not just offensive for a visual thinker, but it reveals how far outside visual experience your thinking operates.
The visual world doesn't seem to exist for you. For those of us who have spent our lives in a visual environment as individuals as well as within our cultural surroundings — and for whom that is the primary way of making sense of the world — that casualness about visual experience is perceived as arrogance. I highly recommend you read "Visual Thinking" by Temple Grandin.