There Doesn't Have to Be a Bright Side
Over the last month or so, particularly since the beginning of August, there has been what I can only describe as a sea of issues happening around me. I was going to call them negative issues, but I stopped myself because I don't particularly like describing everything difficult that happens to us as negative. Sometimes something happens that brings absolutely no immediate positive benefit whatsoever. It brings worry, stress, discomfort, anger and sometimes considerable disruption to your life. However, even within those situations, there can eventually be something to learn. That does not mean that the situation itself was good, necessary or somehow sent to make you a better person. Sometimes an ugly situation is simply an ugly situation. The question for me becomes what I am going to do with myself while it is happening and what I am going to take from it afterwards.
A lot of what has happened around me recently has been external. I call it external noise because that is exactly what it feels like. It affects you, sometimes considerably, but it does not originate from you. You did not make the decision, you did not create the circumstances and you cannot necessarily control what happens next. That was something I had to keep reminding myself of because, when something affects your life directly, it is very easy to absorb it as though it belongs to you. In my case, I eventually had to say to myself that this does not depend on me, I cannot control it, and therefore I need to return the responsibility for it to wherever it actually belongs.
Please don't imagine that I reached that conclusion while sitting peacefully somewhere drinking tea. I struggled. I cried. I screamed. I called people names. I broke a plate. I had my moments, and I allowed myself to have them. I allowed myself to recognise that I was angry, sad, frustrated and sometimes completely fed up. I didn't immediately try to turn every emotion into something beautiful or spiritual. Sometimes I needed to be angry. Sometimes I needed to ask why. Sometimes I needed to let the emotion come out before I could even begin to think clearly about what was happening.
I think this is important because we can misunderstand emotional regulation and turn it into another impossible standard. Being emotionally regulated does not mean that nothing ever gets to you. We are human beings. We have blood running through our veins. I don't care how spiritual you are, how much you meditate or how emotionally aware you believe yourself to be. Something can happen tomorrow and make you extremely angry. You may be upset for an hour, a day or several days. Personally, I like to say that if I have given something more than a week of my emotional life, it is becoming very expensive. But even that is my own way of looking at things, not a rule for everybody else.
What mattered was that, after allowing myself to feel everything I needed to feel, I started finding my way back to myself. That was not as easy as writing the sentence makes it sound. I would begin closing the door on one situation and another event would happen. Then something else. The external circumstances didn't suddenly become cooperative because I had decided to protect my peace. I had to repeatedly separate what was happening around me from who I was inside it.
Then something rather funny started happening. I began comparing these situations to children's cartoons. I would look at something that had happened and suddenly remember Sesame Street. Something else would remind me of Tom and Jerry. Then Donald Duck would appear somewhere in my thinking. Before I knew it, I was looking at some very unpleasant situations and finding the cartoon version of them in my head.
And I started laughing.
The laughter did not make what happened acceptable, and it wasn't a case of, “Look who's laughing now.” There are things that have happened over the last month that I genuinely would not wish on anybody. You can dislike me as much as you want and I still don't wish those experiences upon you. I wish you love. I wish you happiness. I wish you a wonderful life. I would simply prefer that, if you don't like me, you enjoy that wonderful life as far away from me as possible. I don't need to see your face, hear your voice or have you involved in my life in order to wish you well. There is nothing wrong with that.
What made me laugh was the absurdity, the irony and sometimes the almost cartoonish nature of what I was watching unfold. Once I began seeing it that way, I also started noticing things about myself that I had forgotten. I realised that I hadn't watched cartoons properly for a long time, despite absolutely loving them. I hadn't listened to children's music in ages. I remembered how much I enjoy buying children's books and reading them simply because I love stories and words.
I absolutely love words. Portuguese is my native language, then there was the English I learned with quite an American influence before coming to the UK and learning British English, and there are other languages that I can manage to different degrees. Sometimes I can pick up a children's book and find one word on one page that sends me away researching where that word came from, how it developed and why we use it the way we do. I used to do things like that simply because I enjoyed them. Somewhere among work, responsibilities, studying, building TFC and ordinary adult life, I had stopped doing some of those things.
That was one of the lessons. Not a bright side. I want to make that distinction because I think we sometimes force ourselves to find a bright side when there isn't one. There was no bright side to some of what happened. There was, however, a funny side occasionally, there was irony, there were coincidences, and there were things I could learn about myself and my surroundings.
There was another lesson too, and this one was less comfortable. Sometimes what we call external noise comes through other human beings. Sometimes people behave towards us in ways that repeatedly undermine, diminish or disrupt us. I think most people have experienced this in some form. Imagine a group of friends where everybody compliments your new dress, but one friend always has to add, “Well, everyone is saying you look nice, but I'm going to be honest with you. I don't think it suits you.” It happens once and perhaps it is simply an opinion. But when the same person repeatedly finds a way to diminish the things you enjoy, you eventually have to pay attention to the pattern.
Perhaps you buy yourself a necklace that you love. Somebody asks to hold it and it gets broken. It could genuinely be an accident. Things break. But if things repeatedly become damaged, disappear or go wrong around the same person, again, at some point you are entitled to notice the pattern. The same applies to people who constantly want access to your home, your plans, your relationships and your private life while somehow leaving you feeling worse after every interaction.
We often immediately want to know why. Is it envy? Jealousy? Insecurity? Does somebody dislike seeing another person happy? Perhaps. Human beings are capable of all of those things. But I have also learned that I do not necessarily need to diagnose another person's motives. I can observe behaviour without knowing exactly what is happening inside somebody else's head. If a pattern is unhealthy for me, recognising that pattern is enough information for me to decide what access that person should have to my life.
That says something important about self-responsibility. Somebody else's treatment of you does not determine your value. Their words do not automatically become the truth about you. At the same time, believing that you are a good, strong or spiritual person does not require you to keep allowing somebody to mistreat you. I can keep my heart clean and still have a boundary. I can wish somebody love and still not want them anywhere near me. Those two things are not contradictory.
What surprised me most during this last month was that, despite everything happening around me, it never managed to become bigger than everything good that was also happening in my life. There has been so much movement, happiness and development around TFC and other areas of my life. There were moments when I was dealing with very low emotions while simultaneously feeling enormous gratitude. It was strange because both realities existed at exactly the same time. Something could be going badly in one direction while something beautiful was developing somewhere else.
Eventually my physical body had enough. I became unwell and I stopped. From my own spiritual perspective, I felt that I had been processing a great deal at once, including what I personally understand as spiritual experiences alongside very different emotional states. I am not presenting that as a medical explanation for becoming ill. What I can say is that I was exhausted, my body needed rest, and I listened. I reduced my work considerably and rested properly for around ten days.
That period also reminded me of something I keep returning to in my writing: taking care of yourself is part of the work. Strength is not continuing until your body physically forces you to stop. Sometimes strength is recognising that you have reached your limit and going to bed. Sometimes it is cancelling something. Sometimes it is eating properly, sleeping, switching the phone off or simply doing very little for a few days. I had to do that, and I did.
Once I had rested, I could see even more clearly that the difficult things had not managed to take away everything else. The positive things in my life were still there. TFC was still developing. I was still creating. My family was still my family. I was still laughing. There were still plans, conversations, opportunities and ordinary moments for which I felt genuinely grateful. I had simply spent a few days being angry and upset because I am a human being, and then life continued.
This is why I keep returning to the idea of keeping your heart clean. I have written about it when discussing Ho'oponopono, manifestation, spirituality and the way we speak to ourselves. For me, keeping your heart clean does not mean becoming somebody who never feels anger or who accepts everything people do. It means being careful about what I allow another person's behaviour to turn me into. I do not want somebody else's bitterness to become mine. I do not want to spend my days rehearsing hateful conversations in my head because somebody else behaved badly. I don't want the external noise to become my internal voice.
The words we use towards ourselves are part of that. When everything around you becomes noisy, sometimes you need to deliberately remind yourself who you are. I am important. I am amazing. I am good. I am a kind person. I know who I am and I know what I am working towards. I will continue working towards my dreams, my purpose and my happiness. My words towards myself will be positive and kind. I will speak to myself with the same love I want to bring to the people I love. I will continue building the best version of myself that I am capable of being, knowing that tomorrow I may learn something that asks me to grow again.
None of those words guarantee that difficult things will stop happening. They don't control other people. They don't make every problem disappear. What they do is bring my attention back to the part that actually belongs to me: myself.
So no, I did not find the bright side of everything that happened over the last month. I don't need to. What I found were lessons. I found some boundaries that needed strengthening, parts of my physical environment that needed attention, things about myself that I had neglected, and small pieces of myself that I wanted back. I found my cartoons again. I found children's books again. I found words again. I found laughter in places where I genuinely did not expect to find anything funny.
Most importantly, I remembered that external noise can reach my life without being allowed to become my life.
And that, for me, was worth learning.
With love,
Marcia
