It's depressingly easy to slip into thinking that our life is special. Unique. Unprecedented. And some say it's even more depressing to acknowledge that it's really not, but I disagree. See, I think there's a great danger to this altar of 'me' that we've created, and I think there's great liberation in realizing that actually, what you're going through right now is something thousands, or perhaps even millions of people have gone through (or may be going through right now).
I play an exercise with myself where I say "if you were watching a movie where..." and begin to list the facts of a difficult situation I'm in. Only the facts. I try to extricate those from the seedy, often unhelpful personal considerations, emotional hang-ups and so on.
If you saw a movie of this precise moment in your life, would you think 'hmm, that's a real head-scratcher' or would the solution seem obvious?
Simplify. Strip down to the bare facts.
I love foxes. This ornament was a gift. It encapsulates exactly how I feel when I go inward. Towards the bare facts of my self.
More often than not, it seems obvious. It's just us trying to protect ourselves from the unpleasant connotations of what needs doing or ignore various faults of ours that make it so complicated. You can run a similar exercise with "what would you say if a friend was going through this"?
We've created this image of us as poor problem-solvers, except I don't think we are. I think we just find it very difficult to distance ourselves enough from the problems that we're facing constantly.
The exercise isn't fool-proof, but it helps. Obviously, it may seem obvious to you in the comfort of your home that the heroine is picking the wrong men or the hero is too agreeable in his job for his own good, but these things are often firmly rooted in your psyche. It's certainly not as easy as saying "oh just start picking better men" or "stand up for yourself more".
So I try to keep myself accountable and remind myself that often, we're the architects of our own misfortune (and as I've pointed out before, what a great freeing notion that is, because if I'm the architect, that means taking the bricks down should be no trouble). Sometimes, we're not. Sometimes, we have misfortune thrust upon us, but even then, we're more in charge than we assume. When misfortune is imminent, do you meet it with courage or fear? Are you facing a terrible situation in your life because you're forced to, wishing desperately someone would protect you from it, or do you rise up to a challenge you're not sure you can face?
I try to find courage in how I go about things. And it helps, in that, constantly going over things. Looking at where I am in my life and how it differs from where I would like to be, perhaps.
Social isolation is one I often struggle with, since writing is a reclusive endeavor and I'm quite introverted by nature, and though it's been the source of considerable misery in the past, I've been managing it a whole lot better since I started saying - Well okay, but have I been doing everything I can to foster the sort of social interactions I hunger for?
It's not asking why the Empire fell. It's asking what you did to cause it to fall.
Obviously, up to a point. You need to understand what things are outside of your reach and not give yourself grief needlessly, but I do think most of us could improve in this area of accountability. I guess in a way, I'm still thinking about resolutions, but not as an end-of-year matter, rather as an ongoing matter. My thoughts now are reflections of my thoughts in October and in March.
How do I meet my life with courage?
I wish I could sum it up in a clever closing paragraph, but it's an ongoing question. I guess a good alternative question would be, well, what is courage?
In this particular sense, I think of courage as scattered building blocks. In part. That's the ownership thing - you use parts of things you've destroyed or situations you were successful in and use those to propel you, to build a resource arsenal for future confrontations. Another definition of courage for me right now is a lot like exposure therapy. I try as I move through it all to keep an open mind. It's much harder than the movies and the cutesy Instagram quotes make it out to be. It's constantly terrifying because it goes off the presupposition that you could at every single turn be wrong.
You need to keep that option open, if you're to have a shot at having your mind changed in response to new Truth. It actually takes a bit of courage in its own right, keeping an open mind to new perspectives, new information. And I find the more you do that, the easier it becomes.
I've had some perspectives challenged and some changed this year. And it wasn't easy at all, because I'd built enough of myself on those perspectives and beliefs. It was not only how I viewed myself, but how others viewed me. And yet, some of it had to change. New truth forced it. So now, at year's end, I guess I'm a little less scared and a little more brave.
I guess if I had to choose one single word for 2025, it would be this. Brave. Because with each year that goes by, I become more aware that it's not just me in this and that the (only) way to grow is grow alongside others, which means love. And what else can love be, if not great, gut-churning bravery?
And yes, that sometimes includes loving yourself when you've ended up in a shitty situation and you are, in fact, to blame. Not at all easy to do.
I actually got a whole bunch of words, because they said we could. It's really a great question that this week's #KISS prompt asks, and I wish I could write more smartly at this late hour to do it proper justice. There's still time to give it a go yourself if you're tempted :)
