The value of a negative comparison

“Do you know where you’re going to?
Do you like the things that life is showing you?
Where are you going to? Do you know?”
~ Diana Ross (theme from Mahogany)

I have an acquaintance who is never having a good day.

If you ask him how it’s going, he always says it could always be going better, even on the occasions when he doesn’t have anything specific causing him to say that. His conversation is a litany of complaints, people who hate him for no reason, things that aren’t going how he wants, what a terrible person he is, how he’ll never ever have the things he wishes for, and how maybe he should just die.

Ironically, he doesn’t think he’s unhappy – and he genuinely doesn’t understand why people stop speaking to him, why he loses friends, and why life in general fails to go his way.

However, he also has absolutely no insight into how he comes across to others, and he absolutely refuses even to think about the possibility that his disappointments have anything to do with what he is bringing to all the different situations that end up going so badly for him.

There are two important things of which this acquaintance reminds me on a regular basis.

The first is, the importance of not assuming that everyone else sees me the way I see myself. This is true no matter what I’m thinking of myself – good or bad.

In fact, no matter what we’re thinking of ourselves or how sure we are that everyone else must be thinking it too – really, we will never fully know how other people see us.

First, because we aren’t seeing ourselves clearly. Like my acquaintance, who thinks he’s happy and can’t imagine how anyone could possibly call him negative – there are inaccuracies in everyone’s self-view. We might see some personal flaw in a more forgiving light than anyone outside ourself does, or we might imagine flaws that nobody else sees – but to assume that everyone else has the same inaccuracies in their view of us would be… well, inaccurate.

This is why it is sometimes helpful (sometimes even necessary) to find someone outside ourselves, someone who has our best interest at heart but won’t protect our feelings at the expense of the truth, to tell us how they see us – so that we can learn to see the inaccuracies in our own view of ourselves, since our views of ourselves can sometimes be inaccurate in extremely unhealthy or even dangerous ways.

And second, because others aren’t necessarily going to see us with complete clarity either. They might see us more clearly than we see ourselves, but they will have their own filters and assumptions affecting how they interpret and give meaning to their interactions with us – and we can never really know the individual complexities of each other’s psyches.

So really, the more we think about how many individual factors influence our perceptions of each other, the more obvious it becomes that it is a ridiculous and thoroughly unsupportable assumption to believe that we know what everyone (or anyone) thinks of us.

I don’t know what people are thinking of me – even when they tell me what they’re thinking, there’s often so much more to be heard in what they say than a simple “I think you’re great” or “you suck and I hate you.”

And I definitely can’t assume that they see in me what I see in myself, in the same way that I probably don’t see in them what they see in themselves.

My acquaintance of the perpetual bad day reminds me that the best I can do at any given time is to present myself honestly, and to act in ways that are representative of the kind of person I want to be, and then rely on that to come across well to those whose opinions I care about.

And if or when I find that I’m not getting the responses I want from the people whose opinions matter to me, it isn’t their fault for not seeing me correctly, but rather it is an indication that I need to listen to what they’re telling me, and then I need to look at myself and my own presentation and figure out why I am not coming across as I intend to.

Which leads me to the second thing my acquaintance reminds me of regularly – that if my life is not going the way I want it to… then I need to make the changes that are necessary to get it to where I want it to go. Nothing will happen because I really wish it would, and nothing will improve if all I do is sit around and complain about it.

This guy reminds me on a regular basis how important it is to not fall victim to my own excuses and justifications for inaction… not to overindulge myself in excessive self-pity… not to get too caught up in who’s at fault for this or that catastrophe in my life, contemplating the mess they made and thinking dire thoughts about what I’d like to do to them for it… not to become resigned to the mess, throwing up my hands and assuming that it will be there forever because it sure doesn’t seem to be cleaning itself up…

By seeing what he’s doing, and how miserable he is, and how resolutely he insists that it isn’t his mess to clean up, it isn’t anything he’s doing that’s responsible for his misery – it’s the whole world, it’s fate, it’s everyone else, it’s not him – by seeing how simultaneously sad and ridiculous and just outright frustrating he is – he makes it easier to look at myself and evaluate my own actions and attitudes more honestly – because I certainly don’t want to appear to anyone else the way he appears to me, if I can possibly prevent it. (And I can!)

He reminds me with every conversation, that we can stagnate forever in recrimination and blame games and finger-pointing and trying to get revenge. We can steep ourselves in bitterness and acrimony and resentment (our own and other people’s), and there is no limit to how deeply we can sink into it or how long we can submerge ourselves there – but meanwhile, life is moving on without us.

The frustration and anger over what we’ve lost and what we’ve already missed out on – these feelings are valid, and they have a definite place in our healing and a definite need to be expressed.

But it’s a painful and miserable place to get stuck, even for those who have lost or missed out on substantially less than the survivor population has.

And healing… does not mean forgiveness, but I think it does mean acceptance.

No depth or breadth or length of bitterness and resentment and recrimination and misplaced blame will fix the wrongs done to us or the wrongs we’ve done – but the longer we stay there now, the more of our own lives we steal from ourselves in ransom to wrongs that are long past changing.

Our future lives, our future selves, are not immutably defined by our pasts… we are creating them each and every day with each and every choice we make. Different choices really do create a different life.

Do you know where you’re going to?
Where are your choices taking you?