The other night (I say night, but it was probably around 3am), I got into bed and grabbed my phone to check social media and start Season 2 of an audio drama called Case 63 before I went to sleep. Except I saw an exchange between friends of mine on social media that was both really cool, and did not involve me, but somehow managed to hit me in the gut with a negative blow.
My mind immediately pointed out that I wasn’t social enough, and that’s why I never get to do things like that with people. Then the thoughts dug deeper. I’m too shy to do that. I don’t know how to be social. Forget the last two weeks I’ve spent gathering and surrounding myself with so many new people that my phone’s contact list is almost as big as my bookmark collection. I’m not good enough. I don’t need to point out the lies that my mind told itself (hint: they’re italicized). It still stung quite a bit, even though I was well aware that it was just an imp in my head and not reality.
I was of low mood due to lack of sleep, which is most likely what cultivated such a fertile ground for the thoughts to develop. Thanks to being tired, I fell asleep rather quickly after lamenting about it on Twitter. It was still bothering me when I woke up. I slogged to the shower, threw on something that didn’t necessarily match, and checked emails for results of a few job interviews, but there wasn’t anything. When that discovery started to add another log to the pyre of inadequacy, I stopped everything I was doing and practiced box breathing to calm my rising anxiety. It was my first day as a moderator for my friend’s Twitch stream, after all, so I needed to be at least a little bit focused.
Getting lost in Twitch chat, and all of the willies, fannies, and bumfarts that come with this particular one (if you know, you know!) quickly got me out of my head for a few hours. When I returned to real life, I noticed the inadequacy was gone for the most part. But I still wanted to visit it and see where it came from.
I’m not Buddhist, but I like to read about Eastern beliefs, because there is a treasure trove of valuable advice that comes out of that area that’s worth learning about, even if you don’t subscribe to every aspect of it. I remembered the first noble truth of Buddhism, which is “existence is suffering.” I’m 45, for example, and I know that because of an invisible heart defect on one side of my family, I may not see 60. I could also live to be 90 like the other side of my family. That’s something I can’t do anything about. I can eat right, stay clean, keep my mind sharp, and exercise, and it would eliminate a lot of potential health issues. But I’m not immortal. Knowing this sometimes rattles me to the core. It is a given, and I don’t dwell on it very long.
Pain is inevitable, this we all know. The Buddha also taught that pain is avoidable, depending on how we decide to respond to it. He used the parable of two arrows to explain this. The initial painful experience is the first arrow. Something happens and initiates a negative reaction (in my case, the initial feeling like I’m too socially inept to establish solid friendships despite recent events blatantly proving otherwise). Being aware of the origin of the arrow allows us to prepare for and dodge the second one (in my case, I avoided the second arrow, that night, because I knew my initial reaction was folly. Had the second arrow hit, I would have doomed myself with something along the lines of I am a failure at friendship.).
Realizing I dodged the second arrow alleviated a lot of worry. I know the origin of the first arrow wasn’t the exchange between to of my friends on Twitter, but a deep-seated lie I was raised to believe about myself that tries to creep up occasionally. I’ll be taking this to my therapist this week.
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