On Taking It Personally

A friend of mine rarely seems to take things personally.  If she does, she does a terrific job of not letting it show.  Lousy day at work?  Oh well, no big deal.  Spouse in a crappy mood?  Clearly, that has nothing to do with her.  It just rolls off, like water off a duck's back, as they say.

I have historically been on the other side of the field when it comes to taking things personally.  A glance with a little too much heat has me flushing with embarrassment, wondering if I have done something wrong.  The abruptness of a few people at work has me wondering what I've done to piss them off.  A slight here, a casually tossed-out snide remark there, and I go into meltdown mode inside the nearest motor vehicle or bathroom stall, wondering what just happened, and why does this get to me so much?

It's a hard way to live, for sure, and yet I have tried so HARD over the years to overcome the ways in which I feel so incredibly delicate, sensitive, fragile.  I've even managed to cultivate a grand ol' horse-and-pony show in which I sometimes manage to come across as obtuse and uncaring when I am feeling anything but that.  One day, a few weeks ago, I gave up.  After some well-intentioned advice that I had heard time and again from one person after another, I was so angry.  In being told not to take things so personally, I interpreted the message as a way to blame and shame me for my own experience of life.  Others get to be cold, unfeeling, uncaring, and inconsiderate, I thought, but I have to find a way to check out of my experience and stop taking things so personally?  I have to condone the bullying behavior of others?  Well, blank that!  I will do no such thing.

That day, I decided to start taking things personally, and like magic, things started to shift.

As I noticed the tons of little things during the day that I was inclined to take personally, the feelings hung out in my body and then dissipated.  After a few days of this, I started to notice that my body began to relax, and curiosity got me wondering about that.  Upon exploring it, I noticed that I had been fighting so hard not to take things personally out of some misguided notion of trying to be good that I was stuffing down everything I actually felt.  I had been stuffing down tiny, everyday kinds of hard feelings -- a bit of loneliness here, a smidgen of sadness there, maybe even a touch of heartbreak -- and doing it for so long that taking things personally had become a kind of safety blanket.  It protected me from more of the slinging arrows of dealing with real, imperfect people in a real, imperfect life.  I was able to be kinder to myself.  I started to get the sense that all of these things I had taken personally were just part of life.  That knowledge didn't necessarily make things easier, or make me like that this is how life goes sometimes, but feeling how I felt and being kind to myself about it made a tremendous difference.

That's not the end of the story, since the end of the story is still to come, but at least I am moving in a direction that makes sense to me.  When I start to take things personally now, it is becoming an opportunity to see where I am feeling some kind of pain, and to be compassionate with myself as I give it space to be.  This, in turn,allows me to put words to it, to speak up for myself when necessary, to separate myself from a difficult situation, or to accept things as they happen to be and move on.  In this, I am starting to glimpse a bit of freedom that wasn't there before.

Blog CPR

Three foolproof steps for resuscitating your blog:
1.  Sit your ass down.
2.  Write something.
3.  Publish it.
Pretty straightforward, isn't it?