The You-Niverse
Somebody said to me this past week, “Are you upset or disappointed with me? I don’t want to make you feel that way.”
The thing is, I hadn’t considered anything about this person in some time. In fact, until anything was mentioned, I was oblivious to there being a problem or conflict at all. Suddenly, I was thrust into an alternate reality where this person’s choices or lack thereof must be affecting me in some mysterious way.
And I scrambled to figure out if this was true. “Have I been ignoring this person on purpose?” and “Why haven’t I thought of them lately?”
It took a moment to sober up and realize the obvious answer to these questions and hark them like comedian Lewis Black might: “Because this isn’t real, you idiot!”
I wasn’t upset with this person, never was.
So why was the argument presented at all?
When somebody says a thing like, “Are you disappointed with me?” three things are happening:
- This person is likely in a lot of emotional pain.
- To account for this pain, he/she must conceive of all the areas in life in which their pain must be impacting others.
- By pinpointing all these areas, it affirms that, yes, they must be bad in some way, and so the cycle continues.
It’s immensely attractive to pinpoint personal misery to mean X, Y, or Z must be happening. The problem is that none of it is real. Feelings are not facts as much as we’d like them to be. And because we feel deficient or ignored doesn’t mean that we really are. A far more likely explanation is that people are just busy living their own lives and hardly ever recognize the struggle of the person next to them.
In psychology this is called the Spotlight Effect because, in our personal narratives, we think people pay much more attention to our lives than they really do.
And so, I recognized that this person’s question had little to do with me and everything to do with them.
Which raised this question for me: how egocentric is emotional pain, really?
Seriously, the amount of gull it takes to believe that you – as an individual – account for the actions of others is a responsibility that borders on being funny.
Is there a limit to how much our actions impact someone?
Do you think there was a German housekeeper shortly after World War II that moped around her living room and said, “If only I hadn’t burnt tea for little Adolf, none of this would have happened.”
Ridiculous? Absolutely.
I knew a bus driver, once, that whenever a car nearly backed out of a driveway without looking would say, “If I wasn’t looking at that guy, he would have backed right into me.”
Uh…what?
Not true in the slightest, but he said this EVERY time as though the puppet strings of the universe hinged on this bus driver staring down a car in its driveway in order to stop it.
I’m writing this as though I’m not guilty of the same behaviors, which isn’t true. I’m writing about this because I practiced this for YEARS.
Question: why am I not dating?
Emotional Answer: because there’s some mysterious deficiency about me that repels people away.
More Likely Answer: there was just a f*#%ing pandemic for the past 1.5 years, which might explain a lack of meeting people (cue Lewis Black: “You idiot!”).
None of this is to say that emotional pain isn’t real; of course, it is. However, it is easy to become drunk with how real our ideas about the world seem to be. To sober up, to me, means to think less egocentric about our problems. No, we likely aren’t causing the heartache or demise of someone close to us.
They live their own, separate lives.
And are ruining them just fine without you.
***
Wishing everyone as well as they can be. You’re not alone out there,
