I’ve been writing a lot lately about struggle. As a world-class struggler, I have a lot to say about it apparently. I started with a long list of successful strategies for struggle. That was enlightening. I didn’t realize that I knew so many! Wow, do I know a lot of them. Wow, have I employed a lot of them!

One thing that I have begun to see with this exploration of struggle is that a big part of it relies on us insisting that things are personal. What do I mean by that? It definitely deserves some explanation as it has become a great thing for me to explore and understand!

Taking things personally works something like this: things that happen in my reality are about me. They effect me because I experience them and I hang on to that effect and turn it into something important and, well, personal – something about me, something pertaining to me. If a waitress brings me something that I didn’t order I can feel upset. I might be upset for any number of reasons that are all centered around me and my self-worth, like that bringing me the wrong order is insulting because she didn’t listen to me, she didn’t respect me enough to listen to what I was saying. Or bringing me the wrong order is a waste of my time. Now I have to sit here and wait for my meal to arrive a second time and I am hungry! Maybe my friends now have their food and either I have to watch them eat. How humiliating for me and uncomfortable! Or they have to wait for me and let their food get cold. How rude of me and of her!

This is taking things personally. This is making things personal.

Another way to look at this, that isn’t personal is to do things like think about the fact that the waitress is a complex being with a lot going on. Whatever happened to create the situation could have absolutely nothing to do with you. At all. She might have heard you just fine and then gotten the order mixed up with a similar one from the table next to you. It might not have had anything to do with her either… maybe the cook read the order wrong, told her the order for your table was ready and so she simply brought it to you.

This is all pretty silly when looked at like this. And yet it happens all the time. We take things personally. We assign meaning related to ourselves when we don’t need to. And this is important because we often assign feelings to it as well. That may seem fine when we feel good. What happens when we feel bad?

And this is all really silly if you think that things that happen in your life should be related to you, that they do have personal meaning. And maybe they do.

And what if they don’t?

Opens up a whole new vista doesn’t it?

Enjoy,

Elena