Bettering yourself, part 6: taking less personally

Assume something isn’t about you. You assumed that was about you, didn’t you? Ahahah—how could it be?

You see how weird our wiring seems sometimes? We’re all too quick to assume most things are about us or involve us, even when we feel so excluded also. What the fuck?

Really it’s wonderful that the mind keeps the existential crises at bay for as long as it does, but at a price, sometimes. How could as much of the world around us be as about us as we tend to take it? Someone could come up to you now and scream in your face, and you don’t even know them, and you’d feel ashamed, shaken up, right? It wouldn’t be pleasant, but it wouldn’t be about you.

I remember teenage events more acutely than memories of adulthood I reckon because my mind has highlighted them for further analysis since some injustice was obviously done to me, but my mind at that time did not have the capacity it has now, so it wasn’t selective enough about what it retained. So little of all that stuff had anything to do with me, especially with everyone else’s minds misfiring at that time too.

I find it hard now to take the following personally: a friend had stopped talking to me. Another friend went up to him and asked him why and I heard him shouting (because he didn’t know I was there) ‘Maybe because Leo’s an asshole!’ Guess what? I was being an asshole though. That was no personal offence; that was an accurate description of what I was being. And the statement wasn’t made to offend me, because I wasn’t effectively “there”; the guy just couldn’t be bothered with me like he couldn’t be bothered with wasps or seagulls or whatever. I do not now and did not ever matter that fucking much. I can handle it, though.

Err on the side of not taking shit personally. You are now in the minority! There’s no bigger bummer than the person who, after a day’s quiet deliberation by themselves, bigging themselves up in the dark, takes you a side and is like, ‘I felt very hurt by…’ Aaaaahhhhh now if that accurately describes something you did? It wasn’t a statement about you! We all do that shit, and it sucks! Let’s all together try and do it less. By the way, in that example, I think it’s better to approach with curiosity, ie, rather than, ‘When you did X, you hurt me,’ you say, ‘Hey, what made you do X yesterday?’ ‘Why did you say Y?’ etc. Because we come up with assumptions quickly, but they so rarely have a correct basis behind them.

I was discussing this with a friend, and showed them this diagram.

Know what he said?

‘You think that’s me, don’t you?’