Taking My Own Advice
January 26, 2010
Yesterday my daughter turned 7. Today, my niece turned 16.
Despite late nights at extended family birthday dinners and emotionally exhausting (despite satisfying) days for everyone in the GeekFamily, the kidlet and I have had a couple of serious heart-to-hearts right before bedtime in an attempt to process some of the more perplexing parts of behavior of other kids.
It seems my daughter comes honestly by the tendency to process the day’s events not as they happen but in one huge data dump right before sleep just like her mother. While GeekDaddy has a tendency to wish the overly-chatty women could not attempt to discuss every nuance of their days moments before unconsciousness, the kidlet and I are often incapable of achieving sleep if events are not processed to a certain point beforehand.
For me, this has resulted in many a late night sitting in coffee shops with a good friend or on the phone with them trying to work through a flow-chart of “what-ifs” and probabilities. It even led to my blogging habits and my initial Twitter forays – as there’s always *someone* to talk to on the Internet.
But when you’re 7 years old and in first grade, you’re sort of stuck hoping that one or the other of your parents is the sort who will work through things with you or relegating yourself to just not sleeping well a lot.
The really cool thing as her Mother though? Sometimes when I’m helping her work through stuff, I realize how parallel our situations are and how much I need to remember the particular lesson I’m trying to help her work through.
One of tonight’s themes was about caring about the opinions of those you respect or love while learning how not to take to heart negative words from those who fall in neither category.
Easier said than done, isn’t it?
So many of us are equipped with the standard, vulnerable and fragile human ego. We learn early that we’re not supposed to care about the cruel words of bullies, strangers, or the spiteful — all the while secretly wondering if perhaps there’s truth to what they say and if we just can’t trust the people we should trust if they don’t agree.
This makes the average person susceptible to those few who actually are trying to make them insecure or hurt out of some misguided sense of power or revenge. And it leads to a LOT of therapy for insecurities and trust issues and neuroses. And a lot of people who could benefit from the therapy but will never go because secretly they’re sure that their worthlessness will be exposed.
I tend to feel more empowered when I remind myself that the weight of 1,000,000 random strangers telling me I’m not ‘worthy’ holds no candle to the weight of just one person whose opinions I respect, and who has truly taken the time to get to know me, saying ‘yes you are.’
