Example without imitation: Plan for 2017 - inspired by others
Before the New Year in social networks slender chorus begin to sound stories about personal results: friends, acquaintances and strangers write about events that have changed their lives, achievements, acquisitions and occasional losses. To some, these words may seem platitudes, excessive frankness or boasting. Behind the desire to question them often hides anxiety - because if so many people get better year after year, why do our own achievements rarely bring pure joy? Are others as happy as they try to appear - and are they trying? And most importantly, can acquaintances, about whose failures and trials you are aware of, inspire your own changes?
My main results of the year are acquired patience and observation. After a year and a half of meetings with a psychotherapist, my personal way to overcome any dissatisfaction with others and myself is to lay low with a fictional notepad and twist such thoughts on slow rewind, trying to catch the moment when they first appeared in my head. Exercise "Why do I think so?" helped to deal with many life views. For example, to understand that, even loving and respecting loved ones, inspiring them is not so easy - we all, in the end, are not David Bowie. I am writing, but I am not Truman Capote, and my learned husband is not Albert Einstein. Yes, we do good things for the most ordinary people, but it is not always possible to rejoice with them in full force. Around us is the most simple and unremarkable life, from which you want to escape now to the book, then to the cinema, where something special is happening.
Against this background of dissatisfaction, many confessions inevitably seem like hypocrisy. My resentment of the world for not being David Bowie transformed into skepticism and disbelief for simple joys that don't need a rating. How did it start? Like many, from the complex of the excellent student and the parental desire to compare the child with others, explaining to him that he is special and worthy of something incredible. I, like many children, lived with a ruler, measuring my achievements relative to others, and focused only on approval. Parents did this with the best of intentions, but they were wrong. I know a lot of similar parenting stories: with high expectations or with prepared reproaches, families raised children who are either always better than the others, or always inferior to them. I think that this is the basis of our neurasthenic relationships with the happy scenarios of others - sometimes they want to be devalued (this is not real joy! These are photo filters! This does not happen!) Or envy (why won't something just as good happen to me right now?) . As one song sang, "there are so many good events in the world, but not about me."
Joy for others is a manifestation of respect for someone else’s choice: you don’t have to think like others to appreciate their achievements.
Having caught the foolish habit of comparing myself with the others, I realized that I had to throw the line to hell and look at the world with my own eyes, not the eyes of a six-year-old girl, for whom family approval is the meaning of life, and the main way to earn it is to be better every peer. In fact, most of the good daily news is the result of informed choice and the strong-willed decisions of our loved ones. Friends start a business, give birth to children, move to other cities, buy apartments, travel and change jobs - they are experiencing this acutely and share everything that happens to them. I must say, these good events are what breaks the tragic news feed, alarming forecasts and exhausting scandals. In an amicable way, it is worth being grateful that someone will post the fiftieth photo of the child or write how he is packing boxes in another city, but for some reason sometimes there is no strength for it.
Joy for others is a manifestation of respect for someone else's choice, the realization that it is not necessary for you to think like others in order to evaluate their achievements. For some, the main motivator is a permanent relationship, and for someone a change of atmosphere every year. And if the first person will warm the soul that you remember about his anniversary, another person will be asked the question: "And where are you going to move again?" When your own motivations are separated from other people's motivations (no one is obliged to love what you like), it becomes easy to rejoice for those who want a completely different thing than you, and this other finally gets - a wedding for a thousand people, a new job or a view residence in a country where you would never go. Having decided to change the approval regime to support, I realized that I was blindly communicating with many people, not realizing that they were actually looking and waiting. Being offended by otherness is how angry that your environment loves other food: gastronomic analogies are the simplest when talking about the difference between tastes and attitudes.
It is difficult to be inspired when we see only the result and do not know where the joys of our loved ones come from and how long they are being hatched. This fall I read a few witty texts about tiredness from small currents — small and always unintelligible conversations on common topics. One author described a complete rejection of superficial conversations at the party and summed up: everyone who came to talk was ready for in-depth discussions about books, movies, psychology and life experience, they were simply embarrassed by social conventions. It was worth agreeing out loud: "And now no talk about the weather," and the crumpled dialogues turned into meaningful discussions about anything.
I will not lie: in my everyday life there are still many basic "Hello! How are you?" - especially with those whom I rarely see. But there were completely different conversations - about daily challenges, doubts, discomfort and fatigue. Of course, it is difficult for us to talk about unfinished business and unclear plans - remember how disturbed the boxes are after the move or the task, performed in parts and with delay. Sharing good news is simpler and happier than those in which he himself has not fully figured out. Joy is often defined, and difficulties always fall into several dimensions. But it is important to remind ourselves that behind every, even a very happy story, there is almost always a struggle and a lot of work. Finding honest details is much more useful than thinking why other people are so different from us. The less superficial communication, the lower the risk of condemnation — a senseless and toxic feeling that feeds the harmful illusions that there is a universe in which those who condemn are better than those whom they condemn.
Parents have mastered a foreign language, a friend wrote a thesis - many stages are left without awards, but given great difficulty
One of the most interesting exercises in psychotherapy is to represent the experience of another, which happened only with him, and not with you and is available to him in its entirety. Is this man enough sleep today that he has eaten, where he is in a hurry now, with whom he is friends, what he is doing at work. This exercise perfectly helps not to disperse negative emotions on strangers (about whom you really do not know anything) and not to start from the fact that someone on the Internet is wrong. Every year we learn a lot - it is important to fix not only our own work on ourselves, but also the work of people you care about. Parents have mastered a foreign language, a friend wrote a thesis, his wife came to work from a decree - many stages remain without awards, but are given a great deal of work. It is important to notice and respect this work in order to correct one’s own steps and to look realistic at other people's successes.
Speaking mutual achievements is invaluable at all, and it doesn’t seem like a fable about the cuckoo and the rooster: flattery and the analysis of the results are fundamentally opposite. Rejoicing at the successes of friends and supporting them during defeats — at least by a short telephone conversation, even by a sticker in the messenger (everyone chooses the communication format himself) —we learn to live and accept our imperfections more easily. Nothing prevents us from saying each other deserved compliments, especially about what is given through the struggle. We are all, of course, not Bowie, but, as he sang, "we could be heroes just for one day". In fact, there are more such days than one, if we digress from comparing ourselves with the “greats” and take the time to hear each other.