Please Use Your Turn Signals

"When you take things personally, then you feel offended, and your reaction is to defend your beliefs and create conflicts.  You make something big out of something so little, because you have the need to be right and make everybody else wrong.         

It is not important to me what you think about me, and I don't take what you think personally.  (If you love me or if you don't) either way it does not affect me because I know what I am.  I don't have the need to be accepted.  I don't have the need to have someone (characterize who I am).  Whatever you think, whatever you feel, I know is your problem and not my problem.  It is the way you see the world.  It is nothing personal, because you are dealing with yourself, not with me."

I've shared these thoughts from the book "The Four Agreements" before because they are so, so important to me.  The Second Agreement is "Don't take anything personally."  One of my A.A. core beliefs is to remind myself that no one is thinking about me, no one is doing anything to me.  That guy who didn't use his turn signal was not trying to piss me off.  That guy is living his own life and has his own worries and distractions so it's not about me and it's none of my business, anyway.

"If you get mad at me, I know that you are dealing with yourself.  I am the excuse for you to get mad.  And you get mad because you are afraid, because you are dealing with fear.  If you are not afraid, there is no way you will get mad at me."

Fear!  FEAR!  It is amazing how often this core emotion is at the root of all bad behavior.  I'm afraid so I lash out.  I'm afraid so I make it about you, about some external circumstance, some person, place, or thing, some organization, instead of dealing with the root causes of the fear.

It really is an inside job.     

I will admit that it is easier for me to brush off criticism than it is for me to minimize affection.  To know that someone likes me or loves me or cares about me and to maintain that it doesn't affect me personally is hard for me to digest.  I'm not there yet.  I may never be there.  I'm okay with this.  I'm happy to have gotten to the place where you can't really piss me off anymore.  Most of the time.  Some of the time.  Occasionally.  Okay, okay, you can still piss me off but I don't lose my shit over it anymore.  But to detach myself from love and affection and approval?  Harder to do.  When someone I care about drifts past me to talk to someone else it's harder for me to be okay with that.  I do crave me some love.