Welcome to the end of a long week, amiright? I know that I’ve challenged you a ton. I want to pick up where we left off yesterday and then I think we can go from there. Does that work? Well, sorry, that’s what I’m doing, so I sure as shit hope so.
Someone comes to you and shares with you that they cannot believe we you have transformed into (imagine a negative version of this, if you will). You are beside yourself. You don’t look within at all. You take their words to heart and you either ask them how you can change or you just start making little and big shifts immediately based on what you think might solve the situation. Ugh. Don’t do this. Try not to. I mean, I have. You know what happens at the end of this? It’s dark magic. You end up changed, but not into a better version of yourself. Just different. Even if the new you has some positive attributes, there is a layer of falsehood and bullshit just beneath the surface, and this colors everything. Shit is ugly.
Does that mean that we just ignore people when they share these things with us? No. I mean sure, sometimes we do. Sometimes we determine that the relationship we have has failed or the nature of the relationship doesn’t warrant a deeper dive. The response there is that you are sorry (perhaps) that you are making someone feel a particular way, but you are who you are, and that either works, or it does not. Period, end of story.
Other times, we use THIS as the starting point for our exploration. The only nuance here is that we might use that relationship or situation for contextual information. We might be able to see something that would otherwise be invisible to us because our attention has been drawn to it. Perhaps, which can be incredibly difficult, we see that we haven’t changed holistically, but rather, just within the parameters of that space or relationship. Then, we have to decide what that means in the bigger picture.
There are times when the people around us will not overtly tell us that we’ve changed. They will not kindly or lovingly share with us the ways in which we are troubling them or hurting the relationship that exists there. Not at all. They will act out. They will rage. They will cry. They will pull away. They might cheat. They might look to or rely on others, professionally or romantically. This is why we can’t look for one particular expression of this observation. This is why we have to be open to it. To what? To the notion that we are ever-changing beings. That’s right. We change all the damn time. We adapt. We grow. We shrink.
We make good decisions and bad ones. We come in close and move away. It’s easy to do all of this without thinking. It doesn’t even matter if you are busy or not. That’s almost inconsequential. I mean it. Generally speaking, we are accustomed to going through the motions and we do it very seriously in every aspect of our lives. Even when we self-reflect, it might not get us to the level of who or what we’ve become. Rather, we might be looking at the immediate impact on our day-to-day and how to manage that particular situation.
What does that really mean? Well, I’m short with people at work (curt, I am clearly always vertically challenged) and I don’t like that I act that way. I don’t take the time to figure out how I got there, nor do I try and understand how to reverse course. Rather, I find a clever and charming way to apologize to the people that I offend. I explore sensible and appropriate ways to excuse my shitty behavior. I find common language that everyone uses so my unhappiness is relatable and understandable. The truth is, there might be one or two people that acknowledge that I apologize a lot but nothing is really changing, but for the most part, they are living in the moment with me. They will start to move away from engaging with me meaningfully, but again, this might not be something I observe if I don’t want to see it. That’s a choice.
However, what if I start to catalog my experiences and relationships at work? What if I start to understand that while I keep things status quo on a daily basis, I’ve mostly lost the long-standing and meaningful relationships that I have? That’s when the good stuff happens. That’s when I acknowledge that I’ve become someone who might be unlikable, and not just to others, but to myself. THIS is not who I want to be. THIS is not the path I wanted to choose. THIS is not the life I want to lead. Those are the kinds of statements that I make for myself in order to get closer to the truth of ‘shit has to change, or nothing is going to change’.
We already talked about the way in which we begin this journey. I can’t talk about how it goes all that much or how it ends, because as you know, that’s going to be different for each of us. I can tell you that there are going to be good days and crappy ones. You’ll make progress and then you’ll likely regress. Wherever you decided to get to, you might end up getting to 88% and you might decide that the last 12% is inconsequential. And that 12% might be incredibly meaningful to another human in your life but that still doesn’t mean you are going to get there. And, you might lose a relationship or two along the way.
This is how it goes. This is growth. This is what it looks like when you hoist yourself from the bottom rung of the ladder to that very next bar above. It feels hard and treacherous and scary. When you look down, you might have ten apprehensive faces and then, you might just have three at the end. That’s okay. When you get to the top, there might be another friendly face up there waiting for you. A new one. Or maybe, you’ll just have yourself. The new and improved version of you. The old you that you lost and now you’ve found. The you that you’ve always been who you finally accepted. The you that you were always meant to be but might not always be.
Get it? Good.
Talk soonish.
x
L.
thepathtoworthy.com 