Sittin' Here, Hurtin' My Own Damn Feelings

This is the face of a Jeep that has hurt its own feelings.

Well, Friends, guess what one of my superpowers is.  I mean one of the ones I'm really, really good at.  

If you guessed leaping over tall buildings in a single bound, you're wrong, unless I've stepped with my bare feet on a snake sunning itself on my sidewalk, but that's a story for another day, probably.

Nope.  One of my greatest superpowers is that I am just aces at hurting my own damn feelings.  Do you know what that's all about?

So when you hurt your own damn feelings, you take something that was said to you or a look that was flung at you, or you reflect upon some exchange you were part of, or maybe you get ruminating on something that honestly had nothing to do with you at all (upon further dissection and discovery at a later date), and you build this narrative around it where you talk yourself into thinking that the other person or people are mad at you or somehow hate you.  You replay a conversation through the lens of your own blooper reel and outtakes (which were talked about yesterday, in the Compare-n-Despair Arena) and you talk yourself into thinking that you were the ass, and that everybody else thinks you were the ass, too.  Or you convince yourself that someone hasn't called, texted, messaged, or turned up because they're just so damn sick of you that they're just going to ghost out of your life right now and fade to black.  And you get all worked up over that.  All mad at yourself.

I don't heckin' know.  There are a lot of ways to hurt your own feelings.  I think we're all kind of aces at it, to be honest.  Otherwise, there wouldn't be half the interpersonal drama that there is.  I do this myself.  I get myself all spooled up over something, ruminating over it in my own head until my heart is just aching, only to find out... from the person themselves, that whatever it was that triggered me hurtin' my own damn feelings was inconsequential, or not directed at me, or completely misinterpreted by me.

Another way I hurt my own feelings is when something goes wrong, and I pre-play the way I think the news will be received.  For example, one time, I was plowing snow with the tractor, and the three-point hitch broke.  I thought my husband was going to flip out and yell and scream and throw things when I told him, and I had myself all built up and practiced on how I'd respond and defend myself so that I was on Quite A High Horse by the time I actually got to talk to him and tell him about it.  I was so sure that he was going to yell at me that I ended up yelling at him as I told him about how it all happened.  

He was confused by the yelling, and took the news that the tractor was broken quite in stride.  It got fixed, and that was that.  In hindsight, I wish I hadn't spent so much time hurting my own feelings and then yelling instead of telling what happened.

I think the key to stop hurting our own feelings is to understand that each of us is the center of our own universe and only our own universe.  What I mean is that instead of that simplified elementary-school model of a solar system with a sun in the center and all the planets orbiting around it in neat, concentric rings, we're each a whole galaxy unto ourselves, and while we orbit someone else, they're orbiting us, and there are other people in other orbits.  There are no concentric rings, but just an infinite series of crossing paths.

I'm not being mean.  It can be a tough little pill to swallow, coming to the realization that one is not the center of all the orbits.  On the other hand, once we each can accept that we're only the center of our very own life, and all the people we're connected to is the center of their very own life, it starts to feel like quite an honor to be included in someone else's meandering path across the universe.  

So if it feels like people are ignoring you, that doesn't mean that you're just super-boring and you should bow out; it just means maybe everybody else is doing other things right now- maybe they're all sitting around, hurting their own feelings over something.  Maybe their toilet backed up and is overflowing all over everything.  I mean, that's a legitimate reason not to pay attention to someone else with laser-sharp focus, isn't it?  Or they're just living their own lives in the centers of their own universes, as is their right.

It probably isn't worth us sittin' here, hurtin' our own damn feelings over stuff.  If we could teach ourselves to silence those mean-girl voices in our heads, it would save us so much anguish and interpersonal turbulence.  So... be kind to yourselves today, Friends.  Don't let yourself hurt your own damn feelings!