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The Narrative
Jul. 25th, 2011 01:56 pmMy mood tanked almost immediately after I got up this morning. A step on the scale revealed that I had gained my sixth pound this month. Despite sleeping a good seven hours I felt groggy and out of it. My pants fit a little more snug, and any shirt that I wore just seemed to emphasize the swollen sphere of my stomach. I left the house feeling fat and unattractive.
I don't know about you guys, but for me there's always a laundry list of things I don't like myself waiting in the wings for just this kind of moment. Once I start getting down on myself for one thing, all these other things start to pile on. I go from being fat to undisciplined, and from there a whole world opens up. Within the hour I've gone from "I really need to lose ten pounds" to "I'm a failure who screws up every opportunity given to him and will never, ever get it right." An off morning becomes the latest chapter in this long story of failure.
Once that narrative is established, all of your actions get swept up in the momentum. Ordinary interactions become these social minefields where my failings blow up in my face all the time. Every little thing that goes wrong is ultimately caused by my lack of foresight, or some kind of deficiency on my part. The world stops being just what it is. It's a constrictive, unfriendly place that just leads me back to how terribly I suck.
So when a coworker's request for clarification on an issue I asked for help with was answered with increasingly snippish responses from me, I had to check myself. I pulled out of the conversation, walked away from my computer, and gave myself a little bit of breathing room. It was then that I realized I was spinning a narrative of my failure. I was setting up a coworker as an enemy before he even had a chance to make that decision. I was sniping to try and cover up a failing that didn't have any relevance to the situation at hand. I was being a jerk to people who didn't deserve it.
It's not enough to recognize that you're carrying a harmful narrative with you. You have to find a way to bring it to an end. It's going to sound so cheesy, but I ended up having to forgive myself for everything I had done to make myself upset. I let myself off the hook for being fat. I told myself it was OK that I was so scattered. I wasn't dumb. I wasn't lazy. I wasn't a failure. I just needed to pick myself up and work on being better.
Once I ended the narrative I was free to see the world outside of it. Nothing had changed -- work is still rough, and there's a bunch of people breathing down my neck -- but I didn't feel beaten down by it. It wasn't evidence of nothing ever going right for me. It was just a busy day at the office.
We get trapped by our own stories so often it's easy to forget that we're spinning them ourselves. We give ourselves these stories to make sense of our environment, to give ourselves an identity, to reinforce or values and ideals. And they can be incredibly useful for that. But our stories aren't written in stone. If we don't like the way we're going, there's nothing that says we can't end it right then and there and pick up a new one. Any single moment can be a good time for a fresh set of opening words.
I don't know about you guys, but for me there's always a laundry list of things I don't like myself waiting in the wings for just this kind of moment. Once I start getting down on myself for one thing, all these other things start to pile on. I go from being fat to undisciplined, and from there a whole world opens up. Within the hour I've gone from "I really need to lose ten pounds" to "I'm a failure who screws up every opportunity given to him and will never, ever get it right." An off morning becomes the latest chapter in this long story of failure.
Once that narrative is established, all of your actions get swept up in the momentum. Ordinary interactions become these social minefields where my failings blow up in my face all the time. Every little thing that goes wrong is ultimately caused by my lack of foresight, or some kind of deficiency on my part. The world stops being just what it is. It's a constrictive, unfriendly place that just leads me back to how terribly I suck.
So when a coworker's request for clarification on an issue I asked for help with was answered with increasingly snippish responses from me, I had to check myself. I pulled out of the conversation, walked away from my computer, and gave myself a little bit of breathing room. It was then that I realized I was spinning a narrative of my failure. I was setting up a coworker as an enemy before he even had a chance to make that decision. I was sniping to try and cover up a failing that didn't have any relevance to the situation at hand. I was being a jerk to people who didn't deserve it.
It's not enough to recognize that you're carrying a harmful narrative with you. You have to find a way to bring it to an end. It's going to sound so cheesy, but I ended up having to forgive myself for everything I had done to make myself upset. I let myself off the hook for being fat. I told myself it was OK that I was so scattered. I wasn't dumb. I wasn't lazy. I wasn't a failure. I just needed to pick myself up and work on being better.
Once I ended the narrative I was free to see the world outside of it. Nothing had changed -- work is still rough, and there's a bunch of people breathing down my neck -- but I didn't feel beaten down by it. It wasn't evidence of nothing ever going right for me. It was just a busy day at the office.
We get trapped by our own stories so often it's easy to forget that we're spinning them ourselves. We give ourselves these stories to make sense of our environment, to give ourselves an identity, to reinforce or values and ideals. And they can be incredibly useful for that. But our stories aren't written in stone. If we don't like the way we're going, there's nothing that says we can't end it right then and there and pick up a new one. Any single moment can be a good time for a fresh set of opening words.
