Calling timeout on my own pity party.
Since Saturday I've been kind of having my own pity party. I’m not proud of it, far from it, but at least at this point I could recognize it.
I think it’s been frustrating for everyone around me, and truth be told it would be easy to stay feeling sorry for myself. But in focusing my awareness, I’ve been able to realize a couple of behaviors that I do that initially start my pity party, and then keep me there.
The first is that I have to change my focus from those around me and who I can serve, and instead place my focus squarely on myself. Obviously that’s a balance equation, because you can’t spend your entire life worried about other people, but it’s far too easy to get caught up in only being worried about me.
Secondly, and I think more importantly, I have to stop asking myself what I can learn from a situation or what I can do, and instead focus on what’s been going wrong and what’s not fair.
And when you think about it, that’s kind of ridiculous, because I know the world’s not fair.
During the last 72+ hours of me having my focus squarely on myself and the injustices of the world, I’ve even found myself falling back into habits of blame and justification. It’s like if I can find someone to blame then it’s not my fault, when the grown-up way of handling it is to stop trying to blame, stop trying to find fault, and just focus on what I can actually do to make the situation better.
But truthfully, that can be hard, and there are times when I foolishly allow my emotional state to transition into a negative one, and things that are hard become harder and I lose my focus and fall back into the habits that don’t serve me.
I’m not saying you can’t take a break every now and then, because it’s hard to maintain complete positivity and remain forward-looking at all times. It takes discipline and the right kind of emotional rituals/habits to keep yourself in a great state, and I’m still working on those.
But I’ve realized that when it do allow myself to take my foot off the emotional gas pedal every now and then, I still have a responsibility to myself and everyone around me to use that time wisely and elegantly, rather than foolishly and self-centeredly.
So for now my pity party is adjourned. I’m trying to be the grown-up I’m supposed to be at 47 years old.
As my son says, “some days, adulting is hard”.
-- Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings