I've heard a bit lately from various different people from all different friendship groups and all different scenarios and relationships that echos these attitude problems I see in myself, which makes me think the problem is bigger than just me. Often we get hung up about how we relate to others, or how other people relate with one another around us. To be bluntly honest, I am well and truly sick of feeling this way, and I want to change!
My first major problem is the issue of boxing. We are all for 'unity' and 'respect for people of all walks of life' and 'inclusion' and 'supporting one another' and all sorts of nice, warm, fuzzy phrases like that. But in the very next breath, we say words like 'my type' or 'those people' and proceed to place ourselves in a box apart from the rest of the societal group in question. After we have placed ourselves in our nice little box, we continue to complain about how everyone else outside of our box has put us in this box, doesn't understand us, has isolated us, and is generally so much poorer off for not being in the same box with us. Kinda silly, isn't it? The problem in question here is not so much that people put us into boxes (which is detrimental enough to unity as it is), but that we are putting OURSELVES into boxes, and isolating ourselves from others by our own choice. I don't rant as someone free from this tendency; I've put myself in the 'uncool and friendless' box for too many years to count, before realising it was not the people around me who considered me that way, but my own self-perception. People, "we" are different from "them" only because WE have decided to make ourselves so.In the process of packing up our lives into the neat little system of self-defining boxes, we often place our self-determination on the shelf to get dusty. When we're saying, "They make me feel left out" or "They make me feel worthless" or "They make me feel [insert other non-unifying negative feeling here]", this is the kind of mistake we are making. Yes, stuff happens in life. Yes, we will feel good and bad and in between. Yes, people don't always know how what they do makes us feel. But ALWAYS, we are in control of how we will respond and how we will feel once the initial shock is over. We choose whether we are going to feel like an alien, like an odd-ball, like a hero, like a saint. I don't like hearing people complaining about how others (even the church!) are making them feel or act, when the responsibility for our feelings and behaviour lies solely with us. And I'm guilty as charged! How many times have we been 'made to feel' second-rate and unwanted, when really people are wondering why we never make contact anymore? How many times have well-meaning people said or done something for us, only to be slandered as controlling or rude, when the real problem was we chose to see their actions as terrible, not well-meaning? We choose how we feel in response to any situation.
As Captain Planet would say, "The power is yours!" We are the ones who put ourselves into isolating boxes by declaring how different we are to other people, and putting ourselves into exclusive little groups. We are the ones who decide how we will feel, even if we're tempted to blame it on other peoples' imagined lack of consideration. We are the ones who determine how close we are to the people around us, even if we're tempted to say that it's them who are drifting away. People, we all need to wake up and take responsibility for our feelings and our relationships if we want them to be healthy! That's the choice I'm going to make.
