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.
Friday, April 6, 2012
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?
1. Sit your ass down.
2. Write something.
3. Publish it.
Pretty straightforward, isn't it?
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Top 6... I Mean, Middle 6... Reasons Why Solitude ROCKS!
After the highs and lows of summer school, I find myself on vacation for the month of August. I deliberately chose not to travel or to do anything unusual this summer, and instead committed to relaxing at home and enjoying it, since I’m so used to using my house more as a launch pad during the school year than as a dwelling. While I’ve always known that I lean toward introversion, coming out consistently as an INFJ on the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, I’ve always tried to push myself to be something other than that. Some of it had to do with wanting to fight the smart-but-can’t-socialize stereotype that has always existed, and until recently, I had no idea that that’s what I was doing. To my delight, I found that I didn’t need to keep on constantly battling against myself. I realized that I’m an introvert and I like it! Since I'm bored with 'Top 10' and 'Top 5' lists, I've decided to create a 'Middle 6' list of the reasons why solitude delights this introvert's soul:
8. Books. Coffee. Sandwiches.
All of the above are difficult to fully savor when you’re distracted by things like noise or incessant verbal processing.
7. Earplugs Get Uncomfortable
My resident Partner-in-Crime – a far more introverted soul than I am – introduced me to the proper use of earplugs, and how I wish I had had them growing up! I didn’t realize until I was in my twenties that they could be used for anything other than road construction or factory work. Since then, I’ve used them to block out snoring, block out the neighbors on Competitive Suburban Lawnmowing Day, and for a variety of other quiet-making necessities. On the other hand, having them out and hearing nothing but the sound of the refrigerator humming is a pleasure.
6. Freedom of Choice
It can be awfully nice sometimes to be able to casually decide that you’re going to have lunch…now, rather than needing to take other people’s schedules into account. This is much, much harder to do if there is someone else around. Also, if you are used to making someone else's needs more important than yours in an unhealthy kind of way, or if you haven’t had the opportunity to develop much self-understanding, solitude has a way of helping you to become clear about what you like and don’t, and opens the door to further learning about where your preferences are as a unique human being without them being wrong or shameful.
5. Regular Rendezvous with the Unexpected
I’m amazed by how something completely new has the space to come into my life because I’ve stopped cluttering up all the free time with my brain’s never-ending to-do list. I was lucky enough to find some new radio stations to listen to, featuring world music, folk music, and even an oldies station I didn’t know about because I had the time to get curious about what my radio buttons could access other than Ke$ha, who apparently woke up twice before 9:30 this morning feeling like P. Diddy.
4. Pursuing the Creative Impulse
The pieces of life come together when you have some downtime, and sometimes the desire to do something in one area of your life satisfies more than one need. I had an overwhelming urge to go out to parks and state highways in my area and take photographs one day last week and came home to find that I had an array of photographs that I would be able to use as much-needed decorative art for the Master Bedroom, as well as potential gifts.
3. Spiritual Perspective
It is easy to get into a habit of reaching outside of oneself –whether you’re introverted or extroverted – when you’re feeling depleted and finding nothing to fill you. For those times when nothing else is fitting the bill, even five minutes of hiding in the bathroom, closing your eyes, and taking a few deep breaths can help to re-connect you to yourself or to God/Spirit. The chance to briefly be centered in solitude and be aware can quickly refresh and rejuvenate you.
I hope you are inspired to bring a little bit of the spirit of solitude into your world today!
Friday, March 25, 2011
Chicken Little Syndrome
When I was a kid, I went through a period of time where "Chicken Little" was my favorite story. I remember sitting in my grandmother's basement, switching back and forth between that and the children's version of the story of David and Goliath. Even though there were dazzling bright red letters on light blue background that nearly induced nystagmus on the David and Goliath book, I eventually favored Chicken Little, mostly because it was so silly! I mean, this tiny bird ran around all the time screaming about the sky falling when it wasn't! What a goofball!
Well.
Some twenty-odd years later, in the wake of what could have been a horribly catastrophic work situation, I find myself shaking my head, confused and puzzled by the innocuous, low-key outcome that actually took place and feeling a lot like Chicken Little.
All I know is that, time and again throughout my adult life, I've been in positions where I've found myself worried and fearful of what may come next. Worried that I don't have the skills or internal resources to deal with it. Worried that something bad is going to happen because I opened my mouth and tried on being assertive, rather than being passive or aggressive, or passive-aggressive. Worried that this time, this time it's really going to turn out just as badly as the worst case scenario I'm playing in my head says it will. Time and again, I have found that the worst case scenario virtually never happens.
How did I come to expect the worst out of things? I don't suppose the answer to that is really important. What is important to me, though, is all of the time I've wasted on worrying about the things that I cannot control. No matter what happens, no matter what I think I want to have in my life, there will always be factors that are outside of my control. It isn't like my worrying makes it easier or changes how other people think or respond. To think so is just believing in irrelevant hocus-pocus.
Basically, I can control how I choose to think about my life and what I choose to do about it. As far as I can tell, that's about it. When I think of it that way, there is so much I can control, but at the same time, so little.
Whenever I hear Chicken Little screaming and scrambling about inside of my head, perhaps I can find a way not to get caught up in it, not to follow him around and start screaming myself, but stop for a minute, look up at the sky, and see if it's truly falling. Chances are, it will still be up there.
Well.
Some twenty-odd years later, in the wake of what could have been a horribly catastrophic work situation, I find myself shaking my head, confused and puzzled by the innocuous, low-key outcome that actually took place and feeling a lot like Chicken Little.
All I know is that, time and again throughout my adult life, I've been in positions where I've found myself worried and fearful of what may come next. Worried that I don't have the skills or internal resources to deal with it. Worried that something bad is going to happen because I opened my mouth and tried on being assertive, rather than being passive or aggressive, or passive-aggressive. Worried that this time, this time it's really going to turn out just as badly as the worst case scenario I'm playing in my head says it will. Time and again, I have found that the worst case scenario virtually never happens.
How did I come to expect the worst out of things? I don't suppose the answer to that is really important. What is important to me, though, is all of the time I've wasted on worrying about the things that I cannot control. No matter what happens, no matter what I think I want to have in my life, there will always be factors that are outside of my control. It isn't like my worrying makes it easier or changes how other people think or respond. To think so is just believing in irrelevant hocus-pocus.
Basically, I can control how I choose to think about my life and what I choose to do about it. As far as I can tell, that's about it. When I think of it that way, there is so much I can control, but at the same time, so little.
Whenever I hear Chicken Little screaming and scrambling about inside of my head, perhaps I can find a way not to get caught up in it, not to follow him around and start screaming myself, but stop for a minute, look up at the sky, and see if it's truly falling. Chances are, it will still be up there.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Self-Care and the Green Smoothie Fast
I was standing in front of the mirror today and tilted my head to one side. I had to squint, since I wasn't wearing my glasses. I turned my body so that I was sideways to the mirror, rather than just facing it on an angle.
I pursed my lips together, my brow furrowed, as I strode quickly into my office, grabbed my glasses from atop the pile of assessment notes that I've been steadily cranking my way through, and went back in to look in the mirror again. Then I frowned. I hadn't been imagining it, after all. My abdomen was protruding past my breasts.
I know what this means, I thought, as I pulled my shirt up just to make extra sure. I wasn't making up that whole thing about my pants getting tighter.
At the beginning of the school year, I have the best of intentions. I am feeling good, rested, happy. My food is healthy. It's still sunny and reasonably warm outside. I'm drinking three cups of coffee a week, tops, and my water intake rivals my food intake. But then something happens -- usually work related -- that requires my attention and triggers my stress level into sky-high flight.
There are many levels to this pattern. I might deal with whatever is stressing me out on the emotional and spiritual levels, but by that point, I've somehow managed to forget that the way I stay out of the stress is strictly physical. Enough rest. Healthy food. Plenty of water. Not too much caffeine. Going to the gym and doing more than a 15-minute walk around the indoor track. My convenient forgetfulness -- combined with the sharp increase in the cost of produce, the fact that cold weather makes cold food less interesting, and the fact that I know the location of every Starbucks vendor within a 50-mile radius and how delicious whipped cream can sometimes be -- kind of sets me up to put on a few pounds.
I forget this, I swear, every single year.
It isn't really about the weight or the food for me. As a teenager, I was thin. I would have liked to have weighed a few pounds more, but I was generally fine with my appearance overall. I started to gain weight in college, and I was glad about this. But then it started to go too far the other way, thanks to intimate discourse with my Russian textbook and the Papa John's delivery guy at 2:30 a.m. on most nights of the week. Well, I take that back. It had to do with feeling most of the time like I was in way over my head at a private college 13 hours away from home, and believing that I did not have the emotional resources I needed to deal with such a huge life change.
There were several things I deeply understood about myself when I was 18 or 19, but I didn't realize that much of how I was thinking about my life at the time was contributing to my stress level, and that much of what I was worrying about wouldn't matter much in the long run. Like some new college students, I was terrified, and as badly as I had wanted to get away from home and try something new, I feared that my adjustment was going much more poorly than it had for my peers. I wasn't completely oblivious, but I didn't have a solid idea about how to comfort myself well through some of these major changes. I also didn't have a great sense of how prone my body was to chemical ups and downs depending on the food I ate.
I have learned a lot about this over the past 12 years or so, about my food, my body, and how I deal with my needs for comfort and care. Sometimes my strategies are effective, and other times, they aren't. When my belly extends past my breasts, I view it as my wake-up call that my self-care has somehow gone by the wayside, and probably not just physically.
I marched out of the bathroom, walked into the kitchen, and thought for a few moments before I told my Resident Partner-In-Crime that I was going to do a 7-day green smoothie fast so that he had fair warning. It wasn't urgent. It wasn't forced. It was simply an acknowledgment of the fact that it is time to step back from my habitual way of responding to life in the month of November and to pay closer attention to myself. This doesn't mean that I pay attention to the point of self-absorption, but rather that I notice how I'm feeling, how I'm thinking, and what things are in my power to address in a different way. I can't do this effectively if I'm distracting myself by knocking back a bag of smart puffs.
Stepping back to do something as simple as drink smoothies for seven days and get regular exercise feels like stepping into a minefield. I know it isn't, really, that I'll eventually feel much better like I have every other time I've set forth to interrupt an old pattern. It's also helpful to remember that I have the resources within and around me to deal with any emotional or spiritual fallout. I've acquired enough practice and experience with this over time to realize that I've done it before, and it didn't kill me. Quite to the contrary, it brought me to greater peace.
I pursed my lips together, my brow furrowed, as I strode quickly into my office, grabbed my glasses from atop the pile of assessment notes that I've been steadily cranking my way through, and went back in to look in the mirror again. Then I frowned. I hadn't been imagining it, after all. My abdomen was protruding past my breasts.
I know what this means, I thought, as I pulled my shirt up just to make extra sure. I wasn't making up that whole thing about my pants getting tighter.
At the beginning of the school year, I have the best of intentions. I am feeling good, rested, happy. My food is healthy. It's still sunny and reasonably warm outside. I'm drinking three cups of coffee a week, tops, and my water intake rivals my food intake. But then something happens -- usually work related -- that requires my attention and triggers my stress level into sky-high flight.
There are many levels to this pattern. I might deal with whatever is stressing me out on the emotional and spiritual levels, but by that point, I've somehow managed to forget that the way I stay out of the stress is strictly physical. Enough rest. Healthy food. Plenty of water. Not too much caffeine. Going to the gym and doing more than a 15-minute walk around the indoor track. My convenient forgetfulness -- combined with the sharp increase in the cost of produce, the fact that cold weather makes cold food less interesting, and the fact that I know the location of every Starbucks vendor within a 50-mile radius and how delicious whipped cream can sometimes be -- kind of sets me up to put on a few pounds.
I forget this, I swear, every single year.
It isn't really about the weight or the food for me. As a teenager, I was thin. I would have liked to have weighed a few pounds more, but I was generally fine with my appearance overall. I started to gain weight in college, and I was glad about this. But then it started to go too far the other way, thanks to intimate discourse with my Russian textbook and the Papa John's delivery guy at 2:30 a.m. on most nights of the week. Well, I take that back. It had to do with feeling most of the time like I was in way over my head at a private college 13 hours away from home, and believing that I did not have the emotional resources I needed to deal with such a huge life change.
There were several things I deeply understood about myself when I was 18 or 19, but I didn't realize that much of how I was thinking about my life at the time was contributing to my stress level, and that much of what I was worrying about wouldn't matter much in the long run. Like some new college students, I was terrified, and as badly as I had wanted to get away from home and try something new, I feared that my adjustment was going much more poorly than it had for my peers. I wasn't completely oblivious, but I didn't have a solid idea about how to comfort myself well through some of these major changes. I also didn't have a great sense of how prone my body was to chemical ups and downs depending on the food I ate.
I have learned a lot about this over the past 12 years or so, about my food, my body, and how I deal with my needs for comfort and care. Sometimes my strategies are effective, and other times, they aren't. When my belly extends past my breasts, I view it as my wake-up call that my self-care has somehow gone by the wayside, and probably not just physically.
I marched out of the bathroom, walked into the kitchen, and thought for a few moments before I told my Resident Partner-In-Crime that I was going to do a 7-day green smoothie fast so that he had fair warning. It wasn't urgent. It wasn't forced. It was simply an acknowledgment of the fact that it is time to step back from my habitual way of responding to life in the month of November and to pay closer attention to myself. This doesn't mean that I pay attention to the point of self-absorption, but rather that I notice how I'm feeling, how I'm thinking, and what things are in my power to address in a different way. I can't do this effectively if I'm distracting myself by knocking back a bag of smart puffs.
Stepping back to do something as simple as drink smoothies for seven days and get regular exercise feels like stepping into a minefield. I know it isn't, really, that I'll eventually feel much better like I have every other time I've set forth to interrupt an old pattern. It's also helpful to remember that I have the resources within and around me to deal with any emotional or spiritual fallout. I've acquired enough practice and experience with this over time to realize that I've done it before, and it didn't kill me. Quite to the contrary, it brought me to greater peace.
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