In the Eye of a Hurricane

“In the eye of a hurricane there is quiet; for just a moment, a yellow sky.” -Hamilton

In life, there is so much out of my control. There are so many people that I will never meet. There are so many people who will never meet me. There are natural disasters that no one can truly prepare for. There are accidents that happen. There are people who are full of hate. There are machine malfunctions. There is human error. There is illness. There is pain.   

If me listing any of those things have caused you to regret reading this blog, I hope you hold on a little longer for me to explain why I took you there.

My head swarmed with thoughts. Thoughts that told me, “People didn’t like me.” Thoughts that told me, “I wasn’t enough.” Thoughts that told me, “They are better off without me.” Thoughts that told me, “I could never change.” Thoughts that told me, “You are not smart.” I was living from mental breakdown to mental breakdown. Pushing myself to crippling anxiety.

I anticipated being miserable. When things were going well, I was waiting for the next thing to trigger me. I lived in glass walls easy to be shattered. Interacting with people was a task to fill my day, not a pleasure. Going grocery shopping was a constant battle between me and my anxiety. Driving alone in my car was torture because I was stuck drowning in self-hatred. I was helpless.

Looking back on the interactions with people that gave me what I like to call ‘gold nuggets,’ fills me with overwhelming gratitude. Gold nuggets are pieces of information that bring happiness or enlightenment. My “ah-ha” moment did not come from one instance. I am still collecting gold nuggets.                     

Life is a hurricane. It has the potential for chaos, confusion, and destruction. In the center of all of that, there is quiet. When I think about the overwhelming things I deal with in life, I imagine myself in the eye of a hurricane. I have no control over what is going on around me, but I am aware of the situation. Acknowledging where I am, I have a choice. I could choose to throw myself into the hurricane and relinquish any control or I could be in the midst of chaos and have control over me.

A friend of mine gave me a nugget recently that I am going to use and pass along. He called it “Zoom out!” It helped him put life in perspective. An example of this is my anxiety with grocery shopping. Instead of feeling miserable trying to pretend I’m “normal” because I’m afraid of what strangers might think if I choose to sing to myself and dance down the aisles of Wegmans, I’d zoom out. I am a single person, at a store, in a state, in a country, on a planet, floating in the universe. Hm, I don’t think anyone really cares enough to call me out on doing something that brings me happiness.

After zooming out, I can zoom back in with some perspective. Somehow and some way, I am on this planet. The rate of human death is 100%, yet I am still here. There are so many things that could potentially kill me in this life. My life is so fragile, but I’m still here.

That makes me really excited. My philosophy textbook talked about this idea called “reverence for life.” I am taking every moment as it comes. This is the moment I have control over. I can acknowledge my thoughts and feelings and then decide what outcome I want. I choose how to respond to my initial reaction to something or someone’s reaction to me. I can ask questions if I don’t understand. I can say what I am thinking or feeling without trying to protect other people’s feelings. I can enjoy and appreciate people because I know that we all have our own hurricanes.

My desire as a human is to pull people into the eye of the hurricane. I can’t fix people’s problems; I cannot change what is going on in their life. I can only meet people where they’re at. I would hope to leave people and have them leave me feeling lighter. I am not guaranteed that response, but I can still try.

I am only responsible for me and nothing can take that way. Not even a hurricane because I will find the eye of it.    

Confronting Our Villains

I recently made a new guy friend at work. Anxiety took over my relationship with him, and I became very aware that I did not know how to have a healthy relationship with a guy-friend or otherwise. I became terrified of messing up our friendship that I would purposefully stare at our other mutual friend, who is a girl, instead of looking at him.

Story Time:

It’s Friday night. I go out with some friends. None of us went out to drink, but we all like to dance. While we were out, we run into people we know. Two of them are guys. One, I have proclaimed strong affections of love for, but he did not reciprocate. The other is a guy I have conflicting feelings about. My awareness of the situation is higher than theirs because like most people going out on a Friday night to bars, they are drinking. The guy I proclaimed feelings of love for introduces me to his friends as his ‘Best Friend.’ A trigger is pulled.

Here I am, sober at a bar, being introduced as a ‘Best Friend’ by a guy I’ve been avoiding because he didn’t return my feelings of love. I had told him I was cool with him not loving me back. I tried to make him believe that I totally understood and could get my feelings in check, but that was a lie. While he was being drunk and flirty, all I could do was feel a glimmer of hope like maybe one day his feelings about me would change, and he would love me back.   

That night, I sobbed in the Taco-Bell drive-thru. I knew realistically that those were not how feelings worked. I hated him. I was disgusted by his behavior while drunk. I vilified all his actions. He was my enemy.

At work on Monday, I shared with a few people about the spiritual journey I was on over the weekend. It started with Friday night’s debacle and ended with my new enlightened thoughts. The Friday night story included the villain who called me his best friend. The advice I got from most people about him was to let our friendship die. Him and I were supposed to get dinner during the week, but I should just avoid him. Years of history between us didn’t matter anymore. My side of the story had made him the villain in their eyes too.

There was a twisted knot feeling in my emotions about just discarding him as a friend. I had known this guy for a long time. Sure, I had a lot of unspoken negative emotions towards him, but I also had no idea what was going on in his life. Why did he consider me a best friend? What about our relationship made sense to him? Those questions irritated me. I had to find out, but I did not want to corner him into this conversation. Dinner was out of the question, but grocery shopping seemed like a safe option.

I asked him to join me grocery shopping because grocery shopping alone makes me anxious. True story. He agrees heartily with no preconception of the bomb I felt like I was about to drop on our relationship. I was about to speak my dark ugly truth to him. The outcome was unknown, but the expectation was that he would choose to leave, and our friendship would be over.

To my delight, my friend is not a malicious villain who has it out for me. Though my initial approach of ambushing him in the produce section of Wegmans was not the ideal way of handling the situation, he did not leave. Instead of putting gasoline on my heated emotions, he fire-extinguished them by asking rationally to continue the conversation, not in Wegmans. I respected his wishes. We collected the rest of the items on my list with a lighter tone.

While we were leaving Wegmans, he walked me to my car and said, “I think we need to talk.” Which my comeback was, “Do you want to talk?”

His kind response, “It is not really a want, but definitely a need.”

I won’t go into detail about the entire conversation we had in my car that night. I will say it is my favorite we have had in a long time. I was able to be completely real with him. He returned my openness with sharing stuff about himself that I didn’t know. He so sweetly asked what he could do to improve our relationship, which made me realize how horrible of a friend I have been to him. Friendship is a two-way street. I helped make our relationship unhealthy because I was afraid to speak my truth to him.  

Sometimes in life, we come across people that can feel like the villain in our story. No matter what they do, they make you feel miserable, angry, frustrated, annoyed, and all-around negative emotions. Do you have someone in mind? If not that’s okay too. If you ever do come across someone like that or have someone like that, I want you to ask yourself a few questions:

1.           Does this person intentionally go out of their way to bother me?

2.          What outcome would I like to see if I confronted the person on whatever they are doing that bothers me? Will it help me or hurt them?

3.          How could confrontation help both of us?

4.          Did I vilify this person instead of choosing to see them as a complex human?

5.          What is my truth in this situation that I am afraid to share?

Disclaimer: This method will only work if all members of the confrontation are willing to take responsibility for their actions and look inward. Self-reflection is a huge part of conflict resolution. Openness and vulnerability is the only way to have true connection with other people. There are three things people can do when you share your truth with them- Validate it, challenge it, or ignore it. It depends on what you both want your relationship to be.

I am going to work on having emotional boundaries in every relationship I have. The lie I believed about it being so hard to have a healthy relationship with a guy was all based on my own inability to have emotional boundaries. I know I feel things strongly. Guys who I would want to be my friend will appreciate the depths of my thoughts and emotions. I’ve already had two amazing conversations with the guy at my work. I have a feeling that having a healthy friendship with him will be easy.