One Year Ago Today

Posted on April 21, 2005 in Disappointment

I seem to have started a custom on this day a year ago when I posted an extract from a piece that I had written the previous year. Perhaps it goes to show that certain issues in your life keep coming up. In late April, I seem to be facing the issue of caring about what people think, about needing others:

“You know,” I said to Lance the last time we talked. “This change business doesn’t come easy. When you start to stand up for yourself, a lot of people get very pissy. I look outside and it’s starting to look lonely out there in some ways, but lonely as being out in the desert and seeing the land without the concrete and the bumper to bumper traffic.” I looked out the window at a heavenly bamboo whose bright red berries heralded the latest phase of the cycle.

“They don’t want you to change,” he replied. “They want you to be in their show. You’ve got to live your own life.”

I’ve always run scared, believing that life without people would ruin me. But unless I move to Mars, there will be life with people. Good people and bad people. I choose my company and grant them the right to choose or not choose me.

It takes time to stop listening to that voice which says “You must care what people think, especially if they’ve got friends. They will tell other people what an awful person you are. So either you must discredit them or give in.”

I think I do best when I stop worrying about what people will think and strive to know myself. Not in the hard, battering, crush-imperfection-mode in which I have been brought up, but with compassion. If I cannot be good to myself, all my charities towards others will ring hollow.

One year later, have I learned the lesson? Is this a seasonal disorder that rolls around and crushes me when I am not looking? If I were to diagnose myself today, I would call me confused about people. Do I avoid them? Do I treat them as dispensable? Do I seek them out? I am not sure. What I know is that I like people and I want them around me, talking to me. I want the people who touch me inside to be unafraid of me. I don’t want people feeding me so many mixed messages when I am vulnerable to suggestion.

Yes, sometimes there are times when I cannot help but worry about what other people think about me. It might be this disease that I carry about in my brain. If you were to split open my skull, you’d see a wrinkled mass like toothpaste. How can the brain possibly learn any lessons with a consistency like that?