Saying Ouch

<p style=”clear: both”>The starting recognition that how I experience things is shaped by my attitude has this pernicious sprouting of a harsher personal philosophy.

If my internal conditions shape experience, and I am responsible for all of those internal conditions, then I am entirely responsible for my own happiness. It doesn’t matter what you do to me, if I do enough work on my insides, on my attitude, then you shouldn’t be able to shake my happiness. Because the alternative in my absolutist universe is that I am susceptible to every breeze that blows, I am mired in helpless victimhood.

I cannot seem to find the middle road between I am responsible for everything, and I am the victim of everything. But then I notice that both of these extreme attitudes are more interested in the blaming than the solving. So I struggle to find a new way to do it. Because, honestly? I think it’s okay to be susceptible to how other people treat you. And to recognize that the internal condition/external experience (I have inperiences!) thing is a complicated one, that the two keep feeding each other, and it’s only by struggling for some mindfulness that I even get to insert myself into there and say, wait, this hurts, and I need to choose how to respond to it hurting. But mindfulness doesn’t look like a denial of hurt, or a scrutinizing myself for the defect that allows me to be hurt. And all of the years I have struggled to learn to ask for what I need, and I am still not good at it, are going to have to help me learn to say ouch when I am hurting.