...and vice- versa
It is no one else's responsibility to carry the weight of the burden of someone else's issues. If they have issues, it is not for you to deal with, and vice-versa.
You have enough crap to deal with without adding someone else's to your own pile
Peoples' lives tend to, once or twice in a lifetime, turn into large and tightly coiled piles of crap littered on the living room floor of life. It is impossible to escape one's own Karma. We create the lives we live, and because we humans are great at forgetting this we also forget how much it sucks being expected to 'get it' when someone else's burdensome issues that have nothing to do with you are suddenly very much a part of your life. (It also sucks when we inadvertently or purposely do this to someone else.)
Yes, it is wonderful to know that we are wanted, that our company is enjoyed, that what we think affects other people in a positive way, but just as all this really good feeling stuff can happen, so, too, can it all backfire. We can end up allowing ourselves to shoulder a burden which was not our own but certainly feels as though it is once we have decided that we will 'love' another person. I have talked much about Love in past writings, and the same thing that held true then holds true now - Love does not bind us to something that makes our brain itch and our innards feel like they will drop right out the ass end of us. There is nothing burdensome about Love. Love in all of its forms, whether it is familial, romantic, brotherly, Agape is NEVER a feeling that will cause us to feel like we are obligated to explain ourselves to someone else. We are not obligated to make sure that what we see as the truth of Love measuring up to what another person's standards are, ever, and if it is that we find ourselves in a situation which brings back to us those same feelings of resentment, of anger, of being stuck, then we are not paying attention and it is time to proverbially put the pipe down and enjoy the high instead of trying to get more and more red and glassy eyed with what we are told is Love, but is, in actuality, just another form of darkness that was never ours to begin with.
One is green and beautiful, while the other is off-white and addictive, and like Love you can really like them both but can only be addicted to one of them. (Of course, I only know of the One Love and not the other.) Yet that is taking things out of context in what is probably the worst way possible to describe it, but I gotta be me...so deal with it. Love and Control are cut from the same cloth, and one is addictive while the other is meant only to grow and be shared with those within our inner circle. We can pine for it, but we would not kill or rob for it. The other we become fixated on it as though our very last breath depends on if whether or not we breathe tomorrow. Watching someone who is addicted is hard enough, but watching someone who is addicted can be hell if they continue to try to convince us that even as the two are out of that same area of life this means that the two are the same thing, when in fact, no, they are so, so NOT !!
We cannot fix someone else's insecurities
Every mother knows how heartbreaking it is to hear her child crying no matter why they cry. Just as we are all made to hurt from time to time, we must also allow others to hurt, because they are in the middle of something they need to learn, and obviously if what it is that they are going through keeps on coming back to them, again and again, it means that they have yet to learn what it is that they are to learn. This was something that I had to deal with, over and over again, that I still deal with, and unless I learn what I am supposed to, unless any one of us learns what we are supposed to, we will, time and time again, continue to go through what it is that we go through until we learn the lesson at hand.
There are a million and one ways each day that we are given clues, and sometimes we are shown blatantly through the words and the experiences of someone else, as to the thing that we are just not learning, and one of those things that we HAVE TO learn is that we cannot save anyone else, and that sometimes, we cannot even save ourselves from the monsters that come back to our lives again and again. We want so badly to make sure that no one in our inner circle hurts that we are willing to hurt ourselves on their behalf.
You gotta ask yourself if they would be willing to do the same for you. I mean, yeah, I can think of a few who would for me, but the rest of them ?
Probably not.
But that doesn't hurt me, not even a little bit, because I respect that other people need to be able to live their lives without the drama that someone else can and will bring to it. Needy people are not like roaches. It's worse than that! They are like bed bugs, hiding in the nooks and crannies of our heart and soul, coming out into the darkness and doing what they will when we are not able to see what is at hand with the light of Love instead of the darkness brought with the intention of making someone else feel like something is owed. The only thing that is owed is respect, and even that is only until that familiar feeling that brought yet one more person to us who is needy enough to make us want to crawl out of our skin and jump in their face over something that was never ours to begin with.
Claim your own, but let everyone else carry theirs
My mother is fond of saying that when shit hits the fan, "we all have our own pu'olo to carry," meaning that when things get rough, we have to shoulder our own burden, carry our own bag, so to speak, and we cannot expect anyone else to carry it for us.
A good example of this carrying of the bag by others is when someone who is very sick tells his story to as many people are willing to listen. I know someone like this, and a lot of you reading this now know who it is that I am talking about. No matter how much we want someone else to relate to our pain, unless they have been in the same predicament, there is no way that another person can relate, and if you see yourself doing this and can recall that you have done this then you need to stop being creepy and needy and just deal with the cards that you have been dealt. Yes, that was harsh, but when it comes to learning your own lessons, I am not one to mince words. I am guilty of the sin of throwing my own pity party and am guilty of wanting others to share my burden with me. It is wrong, and at the time I did it I was looking for understanding but what I got instead was pity.
None of us needs to be pitied, because we are not pitiful beings. We are made in the light of Divine Love. We are created in the image of the Almighty Creator and being so means that we also have to live up to that Light, that Love, without the idea that we need someone else to help us carry our burdens. Yes, it is ok to vent, to spill it, to let it all out, but once it is vented, outed, let loose, then it is time to begin to heal, and beginning to heal means that we are also willing and going to begin healing instead of continuing the madness that is wanting pity when what we need is not pity but instead a swift kick in the ass.
I say swift kick in the ass because making others feel sorry for us only puts us in a place where the only thing anyone else can do for us is pity us, because we are intending that to be, and well, you know, when we intend, we get what we want and what we don't want.
Let your own shoulders sag for a bit, ok?
I have never been a big fan of hurting. It is the reason that I used to love to drink and the reason that I used to love to hit things with my fists, and those things that I would hit did include other people and other peoples' things. It took me a while to understand that people do not like being hurt and that people do not want me to hurt but that they would no longer care that I hurt if I continued to make them hurt and did nothing about my own hurting.
This was a hard lesson to learn, and one that came at a gigantic price, because once it is that you have pissed enough people off, you begin to start losing your own things, and when you lose your own things, you also begin to feel your soul slip right out of your Self and then one day ...
...you begin again...but...
...begin to what? Rebuild? Not quite, because just as old casinos on the Vegas strip need to come down and stop being an eyesore, so, too, do our old and outdated ways of thinking and being need to be demolished so that newer ways of being can come into our lives and teach us how to Love again, how to be at peace with whatever comes our way and mostly, to have a measure of empathy so that we try hard not to give others the burdens of our own lives. If we can only bother to make sure that other people only know that we hurt, that we are having difficulties, that we are feeling sorry for our sorry ass selves, then that is all we will EVER get out of life - the idea that we need other people to pity us, to feel sorry for us, ultimately manipulating them into feeling like they have to feel that way for us.
Pity is not Love - it is pity!! Pity rhymes with....no, not smitty...ok, yes it rhymes....yeesh !! LOL
Pitied Vs. Empowered
I grew up in a family where, on one side, women are revered, and on the other side, had to fight like hell with a cantankerous old man for a grandfather who, in the end, we all knew we loved and knew loved us. He used to tell me that he felt sorry for my father because my dad didn't "get it right," when I was born, meaning that my dad screwed up by not having a son first. The old fart used to make me and my girl cousins cry by saying hurtful things to us, by laughing at our tears and scorning our heartaches that he was the cause of. I swore that one day I would make him pay, and I did, but it is not something that I am too proud of and do not care to rehash. I regret few things that I have done, and yes, to my own knowledge the old fart deserved my vitriol, but it was not my rancor that he deserved, but my pity.
For the bulk of my life I feared this man who was my grandfather, and I am positive now that it was not a fear of what he would say or do or even of who he was, but more that I feared his words might be true. When I got older and saw him lying there on his deathbed, it was a mixture of relief and sadness, but the sadness was for my grandmother whose love for that cantankerous old prick was true and real. The fear, I learned, was not for anything more than that he might be right! I might have been useless, I might have been only made for the enjoyment of a man whose only goal in life was to own me, and I might have been any number of things he thought, but the thing is that I learned then what I know for sure now - I was meant as a blessing, not a burden, and that it is not my obligation and never was my obligation to live to be that thing my grandfather assumed, not only of me, but of women in general.
I learned that humans are a sorry lot and being in a sorry position is not a bad thing, no matter what, and that it is only thought of as bad because when bad things happen, well, life sucks !! Life sucks because we do not see the things that we are supposed to be seeing, only that it sucks, and we don't like it when life sucks, not at all.
The bitch of it all
OK ok ok...we know that we cannot expect others to do for us what we will not do for ourselves, and we know that anytime we are in the middle of a sucky life situation, there is no other way out of it but to learn from it. This is the bitch of it all - even if we have learned, we might be also part of and in the middle of a lesson of the person who we hurt, or hurt us, or who we are pitying, and there ain't a damned thing that we can do about it other than LEARN FROM IT !!
My good friends, Lana, Noreen, and my cousin Waipuna, and yep, my mama, all say the same thing, that we have to be willing to learn in order to grow, and if that means that what we have to learn SUCKS, then we have to learn that lesson. We learn that things suck until they don't. We learn that we are here to learn, to teach and to serve, and there is nothing more forgiving than knowing that to everything, even things that suck, there is a reason.
Ha ha!!! Yeah, that's life for ya...ain't that about a bitch? It's like salt in a stab wound...150 proof poured directly onto surgical wounds...but learn, we do, because if there is anything that will teach a person to not whine but to scream it out to the Universe at large, it is Jack Daniels poured directly into an open wound.(Long story of teenage drunkeness and an unfinished wall at a friend's house back in 1987...don't ask lol).
Think of things that suck as Spirit pouring JD into the open and gaping wounds of your soul and then pouring the remainder of the bottle down your throat. Guarantees are that you will not go back to the thing that caused you to bleed from the middle of the soul and that, too, you will learn to not like the taste of whisky to make you whine but in utter and joyful celebration of healing instead...
I LOVE YOU ALL!!!
...Roxanne...
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