God, I wish I could believe this statement more often.
You see, when the shiz in your life starts to mount up, it gets harder to extricate yourself from all of the things that need fixing. Your boss is horrible, you ruined a presentation at work, your bills are overdue and you have no money in your account, you stopped speaking to your sister, you feel like you’ve been on nothing but bad dates in the last year, you feel like you’re perpetually single instead of “in-between” relationships. Whatever happens, these problems start piling up in your mind.
Until you start believing they define who you are. That you’ve failed. That somehow, you must deserve these problems because why else would they be happening to you? Maybe it’s Karma, or maybe bad luck. Am I right? Or is that just me?
I’m not a New Age or religious person, but I am spiritual, and I’m always trying to see beyond the problems to where the truth is. To what has to change. And you know what the most freeing thing for me has been, in all my lessons of “enlightenment,” or some form of that? This little bit of knowledge. That I am not my problems.
None of us are. And we aren’t our roles either – single person, wife, husband, mother, father, friend, CEO, Creative Director, Organizer, Professor, Chef, Babysitter, whatever. These things do not sum up who we are as people, they are merely roles. It’s the same thing with problems. These things happen to us, but it doesn’t mean that we are somehow marked because of them.
Let’s take a specific example. As a single person, I’d often lament my bad dates, wondering why they were happening to me, or I’d get angry at the men I liked who just disappeared. I felt like there was something wrong with me, that I was somehow not as desirable as the people around me who were coupling up. I compared myself to total strangers, standing in line for coffee, arms draped around each other – and I wondered what they were doing that I wasn’t doing. And so on and so forth, beating my head against the wall.
I was not the person I thought I was – the end result of a string of bad dates and failed relationships. I was living the role of being a single person, and seeing what that meant. I was learning what I would and would not tolerate, what I did and did not want. For some people, the journey is short and unencumbered, but not so for me. But that doesn’t make me somehow wrong or inadequate or a failure. It just means that I have a different set of experiences. I’m on a different path.
Problems come and go in life. One thing or another always comes up, and this is true for everyone, not just me or you. The thing to remember – the important thing – is that you are not the sum of your problems. You can choose who you want to be in this world, and your experiences will take you down different roads. These roads are your and yours alone. And they will have ups and downs both. And your problems will not define who you are, unless you let them.
So, I’ll remind us all again. We are not our problems.
About Kelly Seal
Kelly is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, CA. She blogs about dating, relationships, personal growth and what "healthy living" means to her. You can follow her on Google+, Twitter @kellyseal or through her website www.kellyseal.com.
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