This is the first installation of the series Dear Racho, in which my long time friend Rachel and I write each other open letters. It is in response to this.
~~~
Dear Racho,
Thank you so much for your open letter! I'm happy to hear from you! I know we met—and chatted for 6 hours—last spring, but it seems like longer ago. It’s nice to hear your voice (in my head as I read your letter.)
It pains me to hear that life seems to be giving you a hard time. Ending relationships with core pillars of your support system sounds super destabilizing. I think it’s completely valid to feel angry, heartbroken, frustrated, miserable, trapped in a spiral of angry thoughts and feelings, as you mentioned in your letter. Understandable in every respect.
You mentioned in the letter that you learned that those with low self worth tend to make excuses for people’s bad behavior. And once these relationships end, these people with low self worth often rekindle their relationships with the people that hurt them or subconsciously seek people with similar issues. The fact that you mentioned this implied to me that you may have identified with the situation. It makes me wonder if the problem was that some of the people in your life were treating you poorly, and you unconsciously were permissive of that behavior.
Hence, I would like to start my thoughts to you with a couple important reminders. You do not deserve to be shouted at. You do not deserve to be insulted. You do not deserve to be condescended to. You do not deserve to be touched without your permission. You do not deserve to be deceived about important things. You do not deserve to be belittled. These actions are not okay.
You are important. Accordingly, you deserve to be treated with respect. This is true of you, as it is true of anyone else.
As adults—I guess I’m actually an adult now—we are the primary protectors or advocatesfor ourselves. We are the ones that are tasked with personal maintenance, oradvocating for our own physical and mental wellbeing. This means that we need to be aware of when we are treated poorly, and we need to be the ones to take action when we are hurt. Whether this means gently confronting the person or deciding to keep a distance from him or her, something needs to be done. You can’t let yourself neglect yourself. It takes practice but it’s an attainable skill.
One realization you had, that you mentioned only briefly in your letter was that taking some space from a person can help you to objectively look at your relationship with him or her. I get the feeling that this realization plays a bigger role in your process of your reflection than you may think. Why would removing ourselves from some important thing make it easier for us to objectively think about that thing? Objectively, rationally think. I wonder if the reason is that we are so emotionally invested in our relationships, and heavily charged emotion tends to hinder objective or rational thinking. I know for me it’s almost impossible to think about why my relationships ended or what my ideal friend or partner would be like if I feel like crying all the time. So, as an extension of your realization, we need to chill out a bit before we try to process what happened and why.
In the first paragraph of your letter, you mentioned “going through the stages of grief”, but for some reason going through spirals of anger and sadness. This made me wonder if maybe you were attempting to objectively think while also trying to handle having intense emotions. Intense emotions led to trying to “solve” them, which led to intense emotions and frustration, and so on.
Putting these two ideas together, it may be helpful to divert your attentionfrom trying to process what happened with your friends or your ex-romantic partner until you find that you are less emotionally invested in them, by shifting your attention to practicing being your own advocate and attending to your personal responsibilities, which you mentioned only seem to increase with time. Adulting is hard, as you said, but as adults (as we are), it is a really important part of our lives and wellbeing. Why not focus on that for a bit, and then revisit your beliefs about friendship or relationships in a couple months? Meh. There’s no need to rush.
I dunno. I basically think what you said makes a ton of sense and tried to string them together.
Love,
Rina
ponderista
Monday, March 27, 2017
Saturday, March 4, 2017
on excess and me
Picture this. It's Sunday, and you are in your home, sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea, looking out the window at the sunset. The sky melts from orange to deep red. It has been a pleasant weekend. You met up with a friend to go to the gelato shop that both of you have been excited to see for the longest time. You finished all of the housework. You paid your neighbor's kid to wash your car, and now that's clean too. Well, clean enough--what do you expect from a nine-year-old, really? You bring the cup of tea to your lips. The sky is a deep indigo now. You feel the steam envelop your nostrils, and you put the cup down as a strange, sinking feeling hits you in the chest. It's a creeping, nagging feeling that seems to come back at dusk, oftentimes on Sundays. What am I doing with my life? What am I trying to achieve, really? You glance around at your apartment. What is this? The sinking feeling spreads to your stomach and you take another gulp, but the tea just doesn't cure it.
Discontentment. Confusion. Shame. By any of the typical ways to measure happiness, you should have happiness. You have a well-paying job, a humble home, and most of the things you've ever wanted. Everything seems to be in place. And yet... With a sigh, you dump the rest of the tea into the sink and close the curtains.Emptiness remains.
I think we all have this experience. At some point, we acquire the things that we've always wanted, and we expect these things to make us happy. Yet, after finally collecting it all, we're left feeling exhausted and famished rather than content.
There's clearly a problem here. Are we so silly that we expect material items to make us happy? The simple answer is: yes. But the issue is far more complicated than that, and upon looking a bit more at the issue and a bit more gently at myself, I find that it's not all my fault. I don't think that demeaning or degrading anyone solves the problem. So, let's investigate.
Firstly, it can't be your fault because you've been tricked! You've been told this your entire life. We are constantly assailed by advertisements, which promise us the world. The perfume ad promises to turn you into the minx of the city. The car ad promises to make you into the family man (which will make your wife the happy lady she was hoping to be). People grow up in these environments that quietly encourage them to remedy their insecurities through shopping, so it is not at all surprising if the seeds of this idea has been planted in your mind as well.
Secondly, there is some truth behind the idea that materials make us happy. A warm cup of hot chocolate after a long day of work can heal the soul. A three piece suit can sometimes give us the confidence we need to assert ourselves at the job interview. It's easy to look at these experiences and extend our conclusions to say that things are the cures to our ailments, but this is obviously not the case, as there are many exceptions. There are certain things that can make us feel better under certain circumstances, but the abstraction to "all things" and "all circumstances" cannot be made.
So the problem here are that people grow up being taught implicitly that shopping can solve their problems, and through experience they notice that sometimes certain things make them feel better. However, they have their expectations consistently betrayed when shopping repeatedly fails to solve their deepest issues. This gap in expectation and the reality leaves us with a damaged psyche and a ruined Sunday afternoon.
This leads me to the soul-crushing truth: items can make us feel things, but most often, they will not solve our important problems. The problems that people face are far too complex and deeply rooted to be fixed with one purchase. If one truly wants to solve life's problems, one will have to face the problems head on.
So how do we reverse our longtime ritual of collecting items for therapeutic reasons? Many people decide to embrace lifestyles like Minimalism or Essentialism, which encourage people to rid their homes and lives of items and activities that are not core necessities, or even asceticism, which encourages people to avoid indulgences entirely. While I have looked into these lifestyles and agree with many of the core assumptions, I have never really found the need to actively identify with them. I decided to boil them down to the key concepts and explain the essence of them here, and then use them make suggestions for little steps we can take to combat materialism without making the big commitment to lifestyles like Minimalism.
Key idea 1) You have a hierarchy of priorities. There are things that are more important to you than others.
Key idea 2) You can make yourself aware of your hierarchy of priorities though careful observation and periodic reflection.
Key idea 3) Having stuff you don't really care about around you has a net negative impact on your life. You have a scarcity of resources (money, time, and space in your apartment), so spending your money or time or space on things that are relatively unimportant necessarily takes away those resources that could be used instead on relatively important things. Spending our resources on our top priorities is more valuable and makes us feel better. Therefore, getting rid of the things you don't care about positively impacts your life.
The issue boils down to this: you have a decision to make. How should you use your resources? You need to make the criteria for decision-making as true to yourself as possible, and as abundantly clear to yourself as possible. Otherwise, you make poor decisions. This is when that emptiness-on-Sunday-afternoon feeling sets in.
So how do you decide on criteria? Practicing careful observation and periodic reflection are key to developing your criteria. Some helpful questions to think about in this process are: What are your aspirations? What could you not live without? Who are your heroes? What specifically are the qualities or achievements of those heroes that you respect? Be cognizant of your feelings and reactions to things; this is how you collect data on yourself. Next, you analyze this data. Compare your feelings about one thing to your feelings about another. Analyze how you thought and felt about things in the past, make comparisons, and identify themes.
How important is it to you to have many pairs of shoes? Is fashion important to you? Or are you just buying those shoes because your friend says that she read that they are going to be the must-have shoes of spring 2017? Reflect. Feel. Think.
After that, it's a problem of developing the habits or rituals that are conducive to efficient use of your resources. You can reverse the effects that your shopping habit has had on your psyche by replacing that habit with a better one. Replace your shopping habit with a jogging habit or a journal-ing habit or whatever it is sensible people do.
In this way, you don't have to be an ascetic to fight back against the temptation of materialism. We can take some time to reflect on what we truly need, and refocus our lenses on our real priorities: the things that give us joy and meaning.
And, full stop, I guess.
I hope you have some time to reflect on your priorities today.
Love and peace,
Rina
Discontentment. Confusion. Shame. By any of the typical ways to measure happiness, you should have happiness. You have a well-paying job, a humble home, and most of the things you've ever wanted. Everything seems to be in place. And yet... With a sigh, you dump the rest of the tea into the sink and close the curtains.Emptiness remains.
I think we all have this experience. At some point, we acquire the things that we've always wanted, and we expect these things to make us happy. Yet, after finally collecting it all, we're left feeling exhausted and famished rather than content.
There's clearly a problem here. Are we so silly that we expect material items to make us happy? The simple answer is: yes. But the issue is far more complicated than that, and upon looking a bit more at the issue and a bit more gently at myself, I find that it's not all my fault. I don't think that demeaning or degrading anyone solves the problem. So, let's investigate.
Firstly, it can't be your fault because you've been tricked! You've been told this your entire life. We are constantly assailed by advertisements, which promise us the world. The perfume ad promises to turn you into the minx of the city. The car ad promises to make you into the family man (which will make your wife the happy lady she was hoping to be). People grow up in these environments that quietly encourage them to remedy their insecurities through shopping, so it is not at all surprising if the seeds of this idea has been planted in your mind as well.
Secondly, there is some truth behind the idea that materials make us happy. A warm cup of hot chocolate after a long day of work can heal the soul. A three piece suit can sometimes give us the confidence we need to assert ourselves at the job interview. It's easy to look at these experiences and extend our conclusions to say that things are the cures to our ailments, but this is obviously not the case, as there are many exceptions. There are certain things that can make us feel better under certain circumstances, but the abstraction to "all things" and "all circumstances" cannot be made.
So the problem here are that people grow up being taught implicitly that shopping can solve their problems, and through experience they notice that sometimes certain things make them feel better. However, they have their expectations consistently betrayed when shopping repeatedly fails to solve their deepest issues. This gap in expectation and the reality leaves us with a damaged psyche and a ruined Sunday afternoon.
This leads me to the soul-crushing truth: items can make us feel things, but most often, they will not solve our important problems. The problems that people face are far too complex and deeply rooted to be fixed with one purchase. If one truly wants to solve life's problems, one will have to face the problems head on.
So how do we reverse our longtime ritual of collecting items for therapeutic reasons? Many people decide to embrace lifestyles like Minimalism or Essentialism, which encourage people to rid their homes and lives of items and activities that are not core necessities, or even asceticism, which encourages people to avoid indulgences entirely. While I have looked into these lifestyles and agree with many of the core assumptions, I have never really found the need to actively identify with them. I decided to boil them down to the key concepts and explain the essence of them here, and then use them make suggestions for little steps we can take to combat materialism without making the big commitment to lifestyles like Minimalism.
Key idea 1) You have a hierarchy of priorities. There are things that are more important to you than others.
Key idea 2) You can make yourself aware of your hierarchy of priorities though careful observation and periodic reflection.
Key idea 3) Having stuff you don't really care about around you has a net negative impact on your life. You have a scarcity of resources (money, time, and space in your apartment), so spending your money or time or space on things that are relatively unimportant necessarily takes away those resources that could be used instead on relatively important things. Spending our resources on our top priorities is more valuable and makes us feel better. Therefore, getting rid of the things you don't care about positively impacts your life.
The issue boils down to this: you have a decision to make. How should you use your resources? You need to make the criteria for decision-making as true to yourself as possible, and as abundantly clear to yourself as possible. Otherwise, you make poor decisions. This is when that emptiness-on-Sunday-afternoon feeling sets in.
So how do you decide on criteria? Practicing careful observation and periodic reflection are key to developing your criteria. Some helpful questions to think about in this process are: What are your aspirations? What could you not live without? Who are your heroes? What specifically are the qualities or achievements of those heroes that you respect? Be cognizant of your feelings and reactions to things; this is how you collect data on yourself. Next, you analyze this data. Compare your feelings about one thing to your feelings about another. Analyze how you thought and felt about things in the past, make comparisons, and identify themes.
How important is it to you to have many pairs of shoes? Is fashion important to you? Or are you just buying those shoes because your friend says that she read that they are going to be the must-have shoes of spring 2017? Reflect. Feel. Think.
After that, it's a problem of developing the habits or rituals that are conducive to efficient use of your resources. You can reverse the effects that your shopping habit has had on your psyche by replacing that habit with a better one. Replace your shopping habit with a jogging habit or a journal-ing habit or whatever it is sensible people do.
In this way, you don't have to be an ascetic to fight back against the temptation of materialism. We can take some time to reflect on what we truly need, and refocus our lenses on our real priorities: the things that give us joy and meaning.
And, full stop, I guess.
I hope you have some time to reflect on your priorities today.
Love and peace,
Rina
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