My Few Steps Back on Life’s Journey
As we work on ourselves, we are bound to make forward progress and then a few steps back. This weekend I took a step back and I’m glad I did. It gave me the opportunity to slow down and take care of me as I nurtured myself back into a “good” place.
Over the weekend I had 2 encounters back to back where people disregarded me over products purchased. They didn’t seem to think it was a “big deal” things were unavailable or ready to pick up at the scheduled time. To me, when I order or pay for something I expect the product when promised and available to me for my use. I don’t believe this is a large request if I’ve done my part in ordering early as well as paying for my purchase.
I get this happens and I have the right to react any way I see fit for this, which I own entirely. What allowed me a growth moment is when I sat with the feeling of not liking the fact of being disregarded completely. I used to ask, “why me?”, “am I not important enough?”, “was my money not good enough to value my order?”, “why did my time not matter?”, and lastly, “why did I deserve this treatment?”. For me, being able to put my finger on the idea of feeling disregarded instead of the why questions was HUGE. This wasn’t about me, it was about them, so the why me questions weren’t important anymore.
For many years, these questions would float through my brain and sometimes come out of my mouth without a second thought. I would own other people’s crappy attitudes as my own because they were aimed at me whether I deserved it or not, but I chose to internalize it. I chose to make it about me instead of them just being assholes or their day was far worse than mine if they were going to behave in this manner to someone who purchased a product from them.
This time, I was pissed they thought they could treat me like that without me standing up and saying “oh hell no, this shit isn’t going to go down like this”. I didn’t take it personally, but was bothered on how I felt inside when I thought about being disregarded. From the moment this stuff was happening, I knew this wasn’t about me. I knew I did my job in ordering early as well as paying for my purchase. I also had the right to share my displeasure and they could react any way they wanted to act, but so could I.
I sat this weekend and was able to care for me in feeling disregarded and grow from this as well as be proud of myself for not making other people’s attitudes about me. People behave how they choose. We get to react how we feel is best. Truly the only thing we have control over is our reaction to the situations we find ourselves in.
Choice is one of the most powerful things we get to do. We don’t have to let things happen, we have a choice in how we handle it as well as how we think about it.