Musings

I’ve been regaling pretty much anyone who will listen lately about my adventures in reading the letters of Mary Todd Lincoln. For the last few days I’ve been trudging through Mary’s first year of widowhood. Her letters are filled with wishes that she would die so that she could join her husband. I don’t have the letters she received (she apparently burnt most of the letters she got) but one can imagine her friends trying to cheer her up with reminders of family life and holidays. She would hear none of it. In fact, Mary wrote to one friend whose husband was dying, “I wish I had had the chance to nurse my husband through a long illness. One final word would have meant so much.” Notes about Christmas inspired Mary to write about how miserable her Christmas was going to be. Notes of condolence just seemed like an open invitation for her to go on about how she wanted to die. No one was more alone than she.

If there is one thing I have learned in my time here on Earth, it’s that everybody has a story – at least one. Even the people who seem the happiest have a story they might sit down to tell you during a late-night talk. Everyone has something in their lives that is a tender spot, and it is a spot that can be poked without anyone realizing what they are doing.

When we are in the throes of something painful, whatever it might be, it is very easy to feel isolated and alone. It seems like everybody has the thing we have lost. It seems like everybody is enjoying what we’re lamenting. It seems everybody is taking for granted that which we want most. It was easy for Mary to feel that, having lost two sons and a husband, she was the most cursed woman walking the face of the earth, and yet one of her dear friends had lost six children. Two of her friends, in the course of a year, also lost their husbands. The details were different, but had Mary chosen, she could have come together with those women and learned from them, and they might have learned from her. She might not have felt so alone.

When that tender part of your heart is stabbed (and that can happen SO easily here in the online world, where words are thrown carelessly about), try your hardest to avoid the downward spiral that convinces you that you are alone. You are not alone. And if you are going through something awful just now, as you are reading this, you are not alone. And people are not purposefully trying to make that tender spot bleed.

Do not lock yourself behind a dark veil and closed doors when you go through a hard time. Do not convince yourself you are alone by creating a reality in which you physically are alone. There is not a person who has walked your exact path, but there are people who have walked paths that are very similar. They are walking them now. You may not be able to see them because they might feel alone too, but they are there. Reach out and grab a hand. Reach out and tell a piece of your story. You might be surprised to find how far from alone you really are.

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Every now and then, you come upon the wise saying that goes something like this: “Life is short. Eat your dessert first.” I’ve encountered a lot of real-life moments where this saying has crept into my head. There have been trips I’ve really really wanted to take but I didn’t have the money at the time. If I had followed the “eat your dessert first” mentality, I would have gone and I would have worried about the cost of the trip later. Other people did make the decision that way and the trip was beyond wonderful for them, just as I had imagined it would have been for me. Did I make the right choice?

Life *is* short, it’s true. You never know what’s going to creep in on you and make things painful or difficult. However, you also don’t want to do anything that could contribute to anything bad. Sometimes living responsibly means eating all of the broccoli and getting to the dessert the next time you’re hungry.

However, I wouldn’t pitch this entire concept. I would just alter it a little bit. Instead of saying that we should eat our dessert first, what if we tried to look at everything as if it WAS dessert? What if we relished the fact that we have to go to work because that means we have jobs and a steady paycheck? What if we relished the fact that we’re paying bills because that means we can run our air conditioning during this hot weather? What if we relished that teenage kid slamming the door to her room because that means she’s THERE and safe and, well, normal?

Granted, it might be difficult to convince yourself that that big mess of broccoli is really a hot fudge brownie sundae. You’d have to do some real fussing with your brain and your taste buds to make that workable. But even there, it’s possible to relish something, like the fact that you have access to that food, or the fact that by eating that broccoli you’re doing a lot more good for your body than that sundae would do.

I’m not saying there aren’t some things that will just not be able to seem like dessert, but sometimes that just means that we are no longer in our normal humdrum state of being. When things go poorly, we long for that normal day when we were sitting at home while other people were touring the Vatican, right? We wish our biggest problem was deciding whether to watch something on Netflix streaming or to read a book. Those are good decisions and can certainly seem like dessert in comparison to other times. So, why not recognize them as dessert while you’re living them rather than lusting after the “dessert” you think you want most?

What do you think?

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Yesterday I visited my favorite bakery. The counters there, much like the counters everywhere, extend far above my head as I only stand at 4’5, so it’s hard for people to spot me unless they see me come through the door. I was looking at items and was next in line when all of a sudden the woman behind me started to order. She clearly did not recognize I was an adult, and the woman behind the counter hadn’t seen me.

When I was in high school and college especially, these kinds of events used to infuriate me. I would sometimes simply step out of line and leave without ordering anything. I would go home and cry because I felt so badly that I was overlooked. Nowadays, I simply raise my voice and say, “Um, I was ahead of you in line.” It seems to work.

Which strategy do you suppose works out better for me if I want a cupcake? Getting angry, maybe being rude to people, leaving altogether, or simply announcing my presence and completing the purchase? If you guessed choice B, you are spot on. I still find these scenarios to be extremely frustrating, moreso because of people in line than because of people behind the tall counter. But I have learned to be frustrated for a few seconds and then keep moving.

I believe everybody has triggers like this that cause frustration. You could be in the best mood and someone acts in a certain way or says something and you find yourself flying off the handle, right? What you must think about in regards to your hot buttons (because if we think about it we all know what gets us red-faced with anger) is what you accomplish by getting angry and what you could accomplish by moving on.

Let me give you another example. I run a page on Facebook that is dedicated to educating people about why many Little People find the word “midget” offensive. Someone on there said something very interesting one day. They said, “When someone teases you, don’t get mad. Educate.” This is an instance where again you have two possible actions (and this goes for anyone that gets teased about anything). You can get angry or upset or you can try to use the opportunity to raise awareness about why what the person is doing is wrong. Barring that, you can take the opportunity to educate yourself – teach yourself that when someone is rude, insensitive, or mean, it is about them and not about you. It sounds trite and a bit cliché, but some clichés are around because they’re true.

Consider too the risks you take if you get mad instead of choosing to move on. For example, let’s say bad driving is one of your hot button issues. If you suffer from road rage, you can actually end up causing an accident yourself. Your flustering and bustering can distract you from what’s actually happening on the road. That’s not a very good trade-off, and I guarantee you that no matter how mad you get, that person will always be a bad driver. Your fingers, your horn, and their ability to read lips will not affect their overall driving philosophy.

So what are your hot button issues? How would it benefit you if you started to move on instead of investing a lot of time in getting angry or hurt or upset? Let’s talk about it!

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In what could best be described as a moment of rubbernecking, I decided to watch LeBron James’ acceptance speech after receiving the MPV award for the Finals, and then I also watched one of his post-game interviews after the Miami Heat put a finish to the Thunder. I hate to say it (I’m from LeBron’s hometown and still strongly dislike the way he treated Northeast Ohio) but LeBron actually said something pretty profound. When asked what the difference was between last year and this year, he said that last year he had played with hate, with a desire to prove something to everyone. This year he got back to his own game.

I can kind of relate to this. In seventh grade, after taking many years of bullying, I decided that I was going to get straight As for the rest of my academic career, not because I wanted to learn a lot but rather because I wanted to make everyone regret that they had treated such a smart person so poorly. This of course did not work. It was only when I re-found my love of learning did my grades start to go up.

It’s easy to feel like playing with hate can be productive. It can seem like it motivates you. It can make you feel like you have a purpose, right? “I’m gonna show these jerks.”

If someone shoots at your foot, you will jump. If they keep shooting at your foot, you will keep jumping. Is this the best way to start a cardio program? Probably not. With every jump, you are not striving towards anything except getting out of the way of the bullet.

Similarly, playing with hate is not really striving towards anything. Rather, you are letting the pain other people have caused you (whatever that may be) make you jump. You might move up and down and side to side, but one way you will not move is forward. You are letting external powers control you, and here’s the really sad thing – even if you reach your first set of goals, you will not get the fulfillment you are expecting. Why? You are not doing these things for yourself. You are doing these things to try to silence others. And they will not be moved.

Paradoxically, the single best way to “get back” at people is to just stay on your own path. People get frustrated when they find their cruelty or mockery cannot make an impact on you. So long as they have any sort of power over you, even if you feel you’re using it for good, they are winning the war.

Just ask King James. He stopped playing with hate this year and he finally got his ring. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Do you?

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When you are feeling down, few things can be more frustrating than for someone to say, “I think your perspective is slanted somehow.” If you aren’t careful, you can end up becoming sort of attached to your sadness, as weird as that may sound. It becomes a possession that only you fully understand, and when people say, “I think you need to step back from this situation” or something akin to that, you can actually lash out at them. You are not as likely to hear anything helpful or constructive in what they are trying to say. What you hear are the words of people who are attacking you or people who are calling you crazy. And that feeds your sadness. It makes your possession bigger and fills your arms more.

The other interesting thing you experience when you are feeling down is that people seem to use words that really cut you to the core. They seem to know exactly what your hot buttons are, and they seem to push those buttons every day, all the time. Have you ever been through a phase like that?

When I left grad school and couldn’t seem to find a job, it seemed like everybody, in whatever they said, was looking down on me. I could almost see in their facial expressions how disappointed they were in my life’s progress. It seemed like with every word they were telling me how frustrating it was to see me wasting my life away.

Of course, nobody was really saying those things except for one person. Do you know who it was? It was me. But at the time, all I could identify was that those words and those feelings were coming out of the mouths of other people.

The really sad thing is that during that same time period, people were saying really nice things and I was seemingly unable to hear or see those words. I remember looking back on a blog post (I was on Livejournal at the time) where I had thought no one had commented. I had used that fact to feed my big sad teddy bear. Lo and behold, there were tons of nice comments there. Always had been. I just didn’t want to hear anything good. So I didn’t.

Are you going through a hard time right now? Do you feel like people are making it worse instead of better? Do you find yourself thinking all of the time, “Why can’t anyone cut me a break?”

Try to take a step back (and this is REALLY hard when you have dark sunglasses on) and see how you are describing yourself right now. Do you call yourself names that have to do with your weight? Do you feel like you’re not successful enough? Did you try something that didn’t work so now you are feeling like you are a failure? Analyze how you are talking to yourself. Analyze how you are feeling about yourself when you go into a conversation with another person. You may be surprised to find that what you think you are hearing from other people is really what your brain is saying about you. It’s really what your heart is saying about you.

It may be hard to let go of your sadness and your bad feelings, but as an interim step, allow yourself to hear good things about YOU. If someone pays you a compliment, let yourself hear it. Don’t let your own dark feelings or disbelief plug your ears.

Does that make sense?

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The other night I was watching my Cleveland Indians play the Cincinnati Reds. It was a close game – tied at 1 for most of it. The Reds had a runner on base and one of their hitters was trying to bunt him over. He bunted the ball and it looked like it was going to be the perfect bunt, about a quarter of the way between home and third. But it was moving fast – it wasn’t one of those bunts that just magically dies in the grass. Our third baseman, Jack Hannahan, started running towards the ball because he knew he’d have to make an amazingly fast play, but at the last minute he pulled himself back. The ball went foul. Barely. His patience and restraint helped out the team, preventing a play that could have resulted in a wild throw or something else that would have been a big problem in such a close game.

In life, we’re a lot like the third baseman. We’re waiting for balls to be hit towards us at lightning speed and we are programmed to run towards it and take care of it as fast as possible. That way we can move on to the next thing, right?

But what if we pulled back a minute and waited to see if the problem would resolve itself? What if we analyzed the situation and said, “Hey, there’s a chance this one might not have to be dealt with right away or maybe even at all!”

Now of course there are some situations where waiting could cause a pretty serious problem. If someone is unconscious, you don’t want to wait to see if they’ll regain consciousness on their own, right?

But I’ll bet if you think about it you could probably come up with some situations where you ran towards the ball and played it before seeing if it might go foul. Maybe you jumped into solve a problem that really could have been solved by someone else. Maybe you started to do something that you could have easily delegated to another person. Maybe you got angry at a person before learning all of the facts.

How can you prevent yourself from that gut instinct to run towards the ball? To me, it seems like it would take a lot of time invested in reprogramming your brain. Our third baseman was clearly programmed to analyze the play and react very quickly based on the information he received, even if that “reaction” was a decision not to act. For awhile, you’ll need to catch yourself consciously running towards the ball. You’ll need to say, “Wait, is there a different way to react to this?” You’ll need to make yourself stop and think where you might have simple “done” before.

What is a recent situation where you may have played a ball that was on its way to foul territory? How do you think you could have changed your reaction for the better?

I’d love to hear from you.

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