Getting past the drama
If you believe that you need to earn everything through suffering, you’re going to make everything harder.
My son has been doing this thing lately at bedtime where he will call out to me about ten minutes after I’ve said goodnight and closed the door.
He plaintively asks me to rock him and sing him a song.
I dutifully return. How could I say no to that?
As I rock him, he pretends to cry.
Is he pretending to himself? To me? I’m not sure. He wails and whimpers a few times, and then settles down.
When the song is over, he wiggles out of my arms and gets into his bed, all smiles. He’s now officially ready to go to sleep.
There are so many things to learn from seeing intense human emotions up close, the way we do with toddlers.
They can’t tell a want versus a need — it seems not to matter. Whatever they want, they want intensely.
And when you’ve spent the first year of your life crying whenever you wanted something, it’s a bit of a shift to realize that you now have the tools to politely ask for it.
Some of us never learn this. Or even if we do, we learn also that some drama helps. I think of the many children I’ve known who put on elaborate performances to convince me, the teacher, that they were unwell enough to go home. Apparently, they didn’t think that I would take them at their word.
I’m always looking for ways to explain why some people get get what they want while others don’t, even when their life circumstances make it technically possible.
Lots of us just keep getting in our own way. And I wonder if part of that is a residual belief that we need to show evidence of suffering in order to prove that we deserve the thing we want.
If you believe that you need to earn everything through suffering, you’re going to make everything harder.
You won’t leave a situation until it becomes miserable.
You will sabotage yourself such that completing a straightforward project becomes a battle.
You will unconsciously complicate something simple because you expect a struggle.
This worldview is further reinforced by the narratives we share with others, along with the attention and sympathy we get from sharing them. If I can’t wait to tell everyone how rough my day was, I’ll pay special attention to the things that made it rough. And from there, it’s not much of a stretch to see how I might unwittingly do things that make it even rougher.
People do this with their attitudes toward money. They do it in school. They do it with their careers, health, and relationships. Success gets further away due to a series of moves in the other direction.
This isn’t an exercise in manifesting your reality. This is just real life.
To offer a familiar scenario: My two-year-old cries for a snack bar, instead of simply asking for one. He wants someone else to give it to him — not me, the person offering the bar. He doesn’t want to say please, even though the bar is right there, inches away.
Should he overcome all of these obstacles and receive the bar, he then wants to open the wrapper himself. He doesn’t have the necessary skills, so he flings the bar away, and then cries because he wants the bar.
As an adult, I can see clearly how the child might navigate this differently in order to get better results with more ease. But I’m over here doing the same thing with my own metaphorical snack bar, and my vantage point isn’t quite lofty enough to see how to bypass the pattern. Meanwhile, I have the skill of being able to rationalize my choices and see them as reasonable and valid, even when they are the equivalent of yeeting something desirable out of reach.
Thus, it’s difficult to catch the things we’re doing to push away what we want. But we can start by confronting the belief that we need to earn it in some way. We can just enjoy it, like my son eventually relaxes and simply enjoys being rocked and sung to.
Over time, by taking our desires seriously and granting them when possible, we build our trust in our ability to get what we want without having to raise a fuss or fight relentlessly. We can get past the drama, ask politely, and do what needs to be done.
The world will still push against us, but we don’t have to compound that by pushing against ourselves.
That one hits
I feel like this was speaking directly to me. Thank you ❤️🙏