I’m a bit bothered by other’s behaviours these days and I feel quite insecure. And I hope Sadhguru’s words could give you some inspiration and hope.
If you are worried about what someone is going to think about you, you will not do anything in life.
First of all, do you really know what is happening behind your back? Or do you only imagine what could be happening? Stop imagining. If someone is thinking something about you, it is their problem, not yours. Their thoughts are their problem. Let them think whatever they want.
Do you think you are that interesting that everyone is thinking about you all the time? And if no one is thinking about you, that is utter freedom. Why are you thinking through what they may be thinking? It is not necessary. Just focus on what you want to do. Let others think whatever they want. Maybe they have nothing better to think about, so they are thinking about you. It is largely in your imagination that someone is always thinking about you.
Most people are busy with their own problems. They are not thinking about you, and that is fine. It does not matter if someone is thinking about us. Do not worry about other people. You cannot fix what they are thinking. So, why bother about it?
Leave their psychological problems to them. Do not try to solve them. They can think whatever nonsense they want. Why should it affect who you are? If you think you are okay, it is fine. If others think you are not, it is their problem.
If you are worried about what someone is going to think about you, you will not do anything in life. You can never get everyone’s approval to do what you want to do. So, do not worry about that. Just focus on what you want to do.
“No thought has any power. You have power. And when you identify and believe in the thought, you give power to the thought.” ~Mooji
It was 2004. I was on day three of a six-month meditation retreat, and my restless and turbulent mind was driving me nuts.
The prospect of sitting on this wretched cushion for another five minutes (let alone six months) was freaking me out.
“What on earth have I let myself in for? This is a crazy idea. I want to go home.”
My restless monkey mind was more like King Kong on amphetamines.
“No, remember how messed up you were before you arrived—and the crazy synchronicity that led you here,” a second, conciliatory voice chipped in.
Destiny had indeed dragged my ass across the world onto this bright red meditation cushion in mysterious ways.
Long story short, my housemate Jack had come to this meditation center after spraining his wrist and having to pull out of a yoga retreat he was supposed to attend in the US.
A few days later, he called me to say he loved it there and believed he’d found his teacher. He was really excited.
At the time, I was going through a particularly difficult period in my life. I had hit a brick wall and had no idea where to turn. So you can imagine my delight when I received a message from Jack, saying, “You’ll never guess what happened. I was talking to my teacher about you and he said, ‘Tell him to come to Canada as soon as he can and not to worry about the money. Just come.’”
Ten days later, I found myself perched on a bright red meditation cushion on a stunning property in the Canadian Rockies.
And this is where the real story begins.
As I sat on my cushion on day three, my restless mind was spinning out on overdrive. I needed help.
Unable to sit any longer, I stood up and approached the head monk:
“I’m really struggling here. I need to talk,” I said.
The conversation that ensued remains etched in my mind to this day. It went something like this:
“What’s the problem?” he asked with a look of compassion.
“I can’t stop thinking,” I replied.
“No, you can’t,” he smiled.
I was taken aback. It wasn’t the answer I was expecting.
“Nobody can. If you didn’t have a crazy, messed up mind, you wouldn’t be human.”
“But I’m going nuts. My mind is driving me crazy,” I pleaded.
“What the mind gets up to needn’t be any of your business,” he continued. “You are suffering because you’re open for business. You need to shut up shop. Just relax, be alert, and focus on your breath. Let the thoughts come and go without resistance. Leave the mind in peace to do its thing and it will leave you in peace to do yours. The mind can only trouble you if you entertain it.”
If You Didn’t Have A Crazy, Messed Up Mind, You Wouldn’t Be Human
Boy, that’s quite a statement!
We tend to see ourselves as special cases.
Nobody is quite as screwed up as I am, right?
If people only knew the nonsense that goes on inside my head, I’d have no friends at all, right?
Over the following six-month period, many of my long-held beliefs about the nature of the mind and the causes of suffering crumbled away.
When I showed up in Canada, I was riddled with self-judgment. I believed that finding peace (if it was even possible, which I doubted) would be a monumental task, requiring a complete overhaul of my broken mind.
Here are some of the key points I came to understand:
Being messed up is an inevitable and unavoidable part of being human. Don’t beat yourself up over it.
Peace of mind is an illusion because restlessness is the nature of mind. Disturbance and mind are one and the same thing.
You don’t need to change or fix your thoughts in order to experience peace. You need to recognize the mind for what it is.
There is no distance between you and peace. It is available to each of us in every moment… no matter what is going on in the mind.
Over time, I began to grasp and apply what my teacher meant by shutting up shop and minding your own business.
I learned that the key to experiencing ongoing contentment is to leave the mind in peace to do it’s crazy, messed up dance—in other words, to mind your own business.
“Allow thoughts to arise but don’t give them a place to land.” ~Papaji
Peace is the natural consequence of not minding what the mind gets up to.
Fast forward six months and I was a person transformed.
I was now finding my time on the cushion enjoyable and hugely rewarding. I was quite prone to experiencing blissful episodes… even with a chaotic mind. I had never known peace like this before.
I had also, much to my own surprise, taken my novice vows as a monk and received a new name. I wondered how that was going to go down with my family at home!
The following are seven key lessons I learned for dealing with an unruly mind to experience ongoing peace.
1. See the thoughts, don’t be the thoughts.
The first and most important step toward reclaiming your peace is to create some blue sky between you and the mind—to see your thoughts as objects rather than being enmeshed in them.
See the thoughts, don’t be the thoughts.
Thoughts are like clouds floating across the vast sky.
White clouds come and go. Black clouds come and go. They are temporary and don’t affect the sky in any way. Every cloud is welcome. The sky has no preferences and remains untouched.
And it’s the same with the mind.
Thoughts constantly change but your awareness is like the sky— vast and unchanging.
Learning to step back and observe the passing thoughts with an attitude of dispassion and non-judgmental acceptance is the key to experiencing peace.
The thoughts are not the problem. The real issue is your identification with them. Recognizing this can transform your life in an instant.
2. Know there is nothing wrong with you.
This was a big one for me.
An ‘unholy’ thought appears in your head—a judgmental thought, a resentful thought, or a jealous thought—and you beat yourself up for having it.
You believe that you shouldn’t be having thoughts like these—that there is something wrong with you.
Well, there is nothing wrong. Everybody, without exception, has these kinds of thoughts. It’s called being human.
The mind is part of the human apparatus, just like arms or eyes.
It is very much like a computer. Your cultural conditioning, your DNA, and your unique set of life experiences determine the thoughts it churns out.
Given your background and history, your mind could not be producing thoughts other than the ones it’s producing.
Your thoughts are not personal. They are part of your programming, part of the human condition.
3. Roll out the red carpet.
When thoughts you label “good” enter your awareness, they meet with no resistance. You are quite happy for them to hang around.
When you label a thought as “bad” or “undesirable,” you reject it. It’s unwelcome.
It is this tendency to judge unwanted thoughts as bad or wrong that creates suffering.
Thoughts are not inherently good or bad. You make them so through your labeling. They are neutral events passing through your awareness and, left alone, have no power to make you suffer.
Let them come and go. Remain as the observer. Don’t give them a place to land.
Roll out the red carpet for all thoughts—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Treat all thoughts as honored guests and watch your peace and happiness blossom.
4. The mind is a bigger liar than Pinocchio.
“I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional.” ~Byron Katie
Take everything the mind tells you with a large pinch of salt.
Question, in particular, your beliefs and assumptions.
Every day, we unconsciously make so many assumptions.
If you dislike your job, for example, you probably make the assumption, before you even leave the house in the morning, that your day won’t be enjoyable.
Be innocent. Be prepared for surprises.
Ask yourself the question: “Do I know for certain that this belief, this assumption, is true?”
Can you find evidence to support the opposite?
You may well find that it is surprisingly easy to disprove some of your long-held beliefs.
5. Don’t allow thoughts to turn into thinking.
Thoughts are self-arising. They appear by themselves from nowhere. There is nothing you can do to stop them from appearing. It is simply the mind doing what it does.
Thinking, on the other hand, is a choice.
A thought such as: “She hasn’t called for two hours” triggers a stream of thoughts:
“Did I say something wrong? Maybe she’s having second thoughts? She probably finds me unattractive. She looks like she works out a lot. Maybe she thinks I’m not good enough for her.”
This is thinking (and it is also based on unfound beliefs).
The original thought arrived by itself. You didn’t choose it. The resulting stream of thoughts, on the other hand, is something you can choose to indulge in or not.
Thinking is a choice. The more you become aware of your tendency to do this, the easier it becomes to stop yourself mid- sentence.
Most of our thinking is unconscious. We create so much unnecessary suffering for ourselves through a simple lack of awareness.
6. Know you are not your thoughts.
Think of it logically. Anything you can objectify cannot be who you are.
I (the subject) am aware of the book (the object) lying on the table. Therefore, I can’t be the book.
You can apply the exact same logic to thoughts, feelings, emotions, or the mind. Anything I can observe, I can’t be.
Anything I call “my”—my thoughts, my feelings, my emotions—cannot be me.
When you believe you are your thoughts, it is natural that you will judge them as “bad” or “wrong” and judge yourself for having them.
Another metaphor used in meditation is the analogy of the screen and the movie. If there is a fire in the movie, the screen doesn’t get burned.
The awareness that you are remains untouched by anything you are aware of. Your thoughts are not you. They are events passing across the screen of your awareness. Who you are doesn’t change.
The awareness that you are doesn’t know happiness or unhappiness. It is only aware. It is always at peace.
7. Withdraw your attention from the mind.
When I first ‘got’ these simple truths, I had a massive Homer Simpson “DUH” moment.
Why doesn’t everyone see this? It’s so obvious.
And yet, without having had it pointed out to me, I would never have seen that engaging with the mind is optional, not obligatory.
Having better understood the nature of the mind and the difference between thoughts and thinking, I now give it far less importance than I used to.
I am much happier as a result, regardless of what kind of thoughts appear.
Fear thoughts, doubt thoughts, and anger thoughts continue to arise as before. Now I know it’s simply the conditioned mind doing its thing. There is nothing wrong with any of it. I only suffer when I unconsciously resist or judge.
Happiness is not about the absence of unhappy thoughts, feelings, and emotions. It comes from understanding that I am not defined by any of these. They are free to come and go as they please.
The mind has as much or as little power over you as you give it.
The mind is not your enemy. It is your most valuable ally—an incredible servant that is always there for you to use as you choose.
“Mind: a beautiful servant or a dangerous master.” ~Osho
“You can have your experience without your experience having you.” ~Linda Pransky
You’re no doubt aware that your moods can fluctuate from day to day, even moment to moment. I think most people can appreciate, when they really consider it, that their state of mind is a big variable in their experience of life. What they don’t always see is that their state of mind is responsible for 100 percent of their experience.
The problem is, it’s often hard to remember this or feel consoled by this when you’re stuck, living in your head, feeling bad.
When you’re stuck in anxious, insecure thinking it can often seem like this way of being is here to stay. It can also seem like the bad feeling is caused by a variety of external things: our partners, our bank balance, what’s happening in the world, or indeed hundreds of other possible situations that all get the blame.
I say this as someone who knows all too well what this can be like. You see, I spent a long time feeling like I wasn’t enough. Despite spending my formative years on stages, playing in bands and acting, I always felt a little lost, unsure of myself, and disconnected from who I really was.
Then, in my late twenties, things came to a head. My music career came to an abrupt end around the same time I went through a messy breakup. To say this floored me would be an understatement. For a long time I was in a dark place, looking for solace in all the wrong places. I’d always been a deep thinker, but now my thoughts threatened to do me in.
What’s more, I was an expert at blame at this stage in my life. I blamed other people (a lot), myself (mainly), and the world (usually).
I lamented why things weren’t happening for me the way I expected them to, but couldn’t see that this expectation was keeping me angry and tight and unable to see things clearly. The blame game kept me closed up, in victim mode, looking outside of myself for reasons as to why I was feeling bad. In essence, I wasn’t taking ownership of my life.
I’m glad to say that after a lot of self-work I was able to step away from this way of being. After years of searching and exploration I began to see that happiness and creativity were always available for me; they were always there inside of me. Just like the sun is always in the sky, even on grey days. If we allow the clouds to part in our psyche, then the sun inside us, our well-being, is always there waiting.
You see, when something happens, like a layoff or a messy breakup, it’s likely you’ll have lots of thoughts and opinions about what has happened that make the event mean something about who you are.
For instance, the event is: your career has ended, but the opinion you have about that is: you’re no good at your job, you’re no good at your career, you’re no good at life.
Another example. The event is: your relationship has ended, but the opinion you have about that is: you’re unlovable, you’ll never find anyone else, you’re worthless.
The problem is that most of the time this happens on a subconscious level. It’s useful to remember that when you pile more and more thinking and more and more opinions onto your experience it only makes you tight and closed up around the issue.
You resist reality. You obsess over what happened. You beat yourself up. You essentially hold on to the experience, allowing it to dominate your life.
I used to feel like I had to grip onto the issue really, really tightly, to keep hold of it until I could work out how to feel better about it. But I now know that it’s this very act of being tight and closed up that makes us feel bad.
It looks like the thing that happened is causing the bad feeling, but it isn’t. Being tight and closed up around what happened is what actually makes you feel bad.
We know this deep down, I think. When we practice being open and looser in life, the same events can happen to us, but they don’t knock us down in the same way. Sure, they’re still unpleasant experiences, but they happen and we deal with them. When we are open, we can see new ways to move forward. When we aren’t closed up tight, gripping onto the issue, we can look for solutions from a raised perspective.
Now, this isn’t about having a spiritual bypass or pretending bad things don’t happen. Loved ones die, wrongs are done, and I’m not in any way suggesting you should deny your feelings. When you stay open to your experience, you can still feel love and even deep sorrow, but without the tightness and the bitterness that are so negative. And this knowledge of how your experience works allows you to react better to these events. You can react with more clarity and compassion.
When we stay open we don’t have lots of opinions about what happens. When we stay open we don’t allow our expectations about how life ‘should be’ to overtake us. When we stay open we can better deal with what is actually going on.
Opening up takes us back to source, back to the loving reality of our being. And the good news is that opening up can be done in many ways.
In its most basic form it’s a sigh out after a deep breath in. In other forms it’s the end of a thrilling roller coaster ride that simulates a cheating of death, it’s a deep belly laugh, an orgasm. It can also take the form of a simple insight, a remembrance, a knowing that the event isn’t causing the suffering on its own, and that it’s our tightness around it and our unwillingness to let go that is causing the suffering.
When we remember this we naturally open up a little. When we see this truth our consciousness can’t help but raise a little. When this happens we can’t help but have more perspective on what’s going on.
To help with this it’s important to focus on three things: awareness, practice, and release.
Firstly, become aware that this is how your experience of life works—100 percent of the time. No exceptions. Events don’t cause suffering on their own, ever. It’s only when you get closed up and tight around them that it causes suffering. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t feel sadness or have low moods, just that we shouldn’t resist them but rather accept them for what they are.
When you see the truth in this for yourself it’ll make less sense to stay closed and tight around issues. When you understand that it’s the closed up tightness causing the real pain, it will start to seem pointless to grip these issues so close to you and not let go.
Next comes practice. A practice of letting go and opening up to life. This may take a little leap of faith, but you can do it. When you do, you’ll see that the bad feeling won’t win, it won’t take over, it won’t destroy you. From this state of openness you will be in a much better, more creative state of mind to deal with whatever is going on. From this place you’ll see new ways of solving your problems.
I know it can appear like if you ‘let go’ of the issue you won’t be able to deal with it. You’ll feel like you need to keep control of the issue, but that’s not the case. That need for control is the tightness, which is the root of the problem, not the solution.
And finally, with awareness and practice, you can begin to release the anxious, insecure thinking and in doing so, the suffering. You can take a deep breath, visualize your body and mind opening up, relax into the moment, and see what new ideas, insights, and solutions show up in this calmer, more creative space.
My hope is that you read this again and see something new that changes your thinking just enough to allow more freedom, space, and happiness to appear.
And that soon, you too will allow your own sun to appear through the clouds.
“What will mess you up most in life is the picture in your head of how it is supposed to be.” ~Unknown
I expected to get into college. I expected to have a career after a lot of hard work, and that one day I’d meet a nice man and we would get married. We would buy our first house together and start a family, picking out a crib and the baby’s “going home” outfit and organizing a drawer full of diapers. We’d have more babies and go on vacations and grow old together.
I expected that one day I’d take care of him until he took his last breath, and then I’d join a travel group with other retired women. My adult children would come over for dinner, and we’d take a family vacation with the grandchildren every year. That’s how it all played out in my mind.
I had a linear view of life. You go to point A, B, C, and so on. You do what you’re supposed to do and you work hard. It was very simple, life with these expectations. Follow the recipe and then eat your dessert.
Spoiler alert: Life was only that simple until the universe pulled the rug out from beneath my feet.
It was an ordinary school day when my life fell apart. These sort of things usually happen on ordinary days.
My husband and I were both teachers, and we woke up before the sun rose to begin our assembly line of breakfast and lunch preparations. Afterward we’d wrangle children and get them dressed and ready for departure, which was basically like herding cats. Then, he dropped them off at their respective places. I picked everyone up after school.
In between all of that we worked and went to meetings and ran errands and bathed children and cooked dinner and tended to all the usual moving parts of domestic life.
Except on that ordinary day, none of it happened.
On April 27, 2016 I woke up and found my husband dying on the living room floor. Out of left field, in an instant, the life I expected was gone.
I never considered the possibility of becoming a thirty-four-year-old widow with a one-year-old who I was still nursing, a three-year-old barely talking in sentences, and a six-year-old only two months away from his kindergarten graduation.
I was thrust into an alternate reality of gnarled, tangled grief, and it was in this new place that I had the painful realization that the life I knew, the one that was familiar and most comfortable to me, was over.
My husband and I planned each of our children down to the day. We even had number four, the one who would never be, scheduled in the calendar.
But now I was a single mother. A widow.
It’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but during this time I wasn’t only mourning the loss of my husband. Sure, I missed him so much that I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I lived my days in exile, not knowing where I belonged. The tediousness of my new life as a single mother wore me down to the bones. The loneliness that festered inside of me created a painful hollowness that felt hopeless; the unfairness of this cosmic roll of the dice made me want to give up more times than I would like to admit.
But there was something else I was grieving: the loss of the life that I expected to live. My dashed expectations. The trajectory of my life that was forever altered, now headed in an unknown direction that felt like it would surely kill me.
We expect our lives to materialize the way we envision them in our hopes and dreams. When life doesn’t go as planned, it can be difficult to reconcile the disappointment of our new reality. Resistance is the first defense. We don’t want to believe or accept the change.
This wasn’t the life I chose. I deserved something better, I thought. “This” seemed so patently unfair. Surely there were worse people who were more deserving of this kind of lightning to strike them instead—so why me? I clung to those thoughts and let them bury me deeper and deeper into the abyss. The resistance might have been the catalyst to the darker parts of grief.
It’s such a disappointing, embarrassing revelation when you realize that you never actually had complete control. It feels like you were lied to. All of those years you spent with your first-world blinders on, thinking that you could plan every detail. It was cute while it lasted. Now it just felt stupid.
I realized what expectations really were.
Nothing.
My expectations were never real. They were nothing more than thoughts in my head. Assumptions. Desires. Never guarantees.
It was always like that, but for me it had been on a micro level. Micro-disappointment, like not getting the job I thought I wanted. A relationship that ended. Losing a bid on a house. I never prepared myself for the real disappointment in life. Earth-shattering disappointment that makes your world crumble and introduces you to your new constant companion: pain.
We usually think the bad stuff we hear about only happens to other people. We’re aware that it exists, but not in our reality. Just an abstract thing somewhere else in the world.
Until it happens to us.
I remember how mad my husband used to get when I’d be surfing Facebook, bemoaning that so-and-so got a new car, or how in love a couple seemed to be, and why can’t we go to Hawaii like so-and-so?
“Everyone puts their best on Facebook,” Kenneth told me. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“No,” I insisted, shaking my head. “So-and-so are madly in love. Look at how passionate they are with each other. Why don’t we hold hands like that?”
“We have three kids under five,” he said, rolling his eyes.
I wish Kenneth lived long enough to know that so-and-so got divorced. He would have told me “I told you so.” And for once, I would have gladly told him he was right.
It’s memories like those that I like to lean into. Life can’t be as horrible or as wonderful as it appears in my head. There has to be middle ground.
When I’m feeling an extreme of any emotion, I have to remind myself of this. It’s just thoughts in my head. Sandcastles built out of feelings, and sandcastles get washed away when the tide rises and brings in a new day. It’s not a matter of being a good or a bad thing. It just is.
My expectations have been a thing that I’ve had to live with my entire life. I’ve always had high expectations for myself. Failure was not supposed to be a thing. As a widow, I found myself floundering in a new reality where I felt like I was constantly failing. Legitimately not capable of doing what I once could.
I wasn’t the same mother to my children. This new me had less time and patience. She was more tired and overworked and in pain. I had to learn to live with the limitations of my new life. My disappointment pooled inside of me like poison. Nothing I could do was enough. I wasn’t enough. Those are all very toxic feelings to carry around when you are already drowning in grief.
But there is only so much time you can spend falling deeper into your pit of despair. One day you realize that you are no longer falling and have in fact reached the bottom. There you are, alone with your despair, so sick of yourself that you can’t even handle your own negative thoughts anymore. You can’t take one more second of it.
This is your moment to get up and wash yourself off and start over.
When the despair stops roaring in your ears and you have a moment of quiet, you can begin to think objectively about your life. Your new life.
I realized what was wrong with me. My problem, I decided, came from my expectations. They were the root cause of my despair.
I expected a long life with my husband, even though he was always a mortal being who was never promised to be mine forever. I expected a lot of things, except for the only thing that was true about life: We are only guaranteed today. Yesterday is over. Tomorrow is unknown.
I knew I wanted to live as best as I could. I wanted a fulfilling life that was hopeful, joyful, and meaningful. I’d have to change my expectations if I wanted all of that. It was impossible to get rid of the expectations completely. I’m only human. Besides, expectations do serve a purpose. They’ve helped me in life. They’ve also hurt me.
The middle ground, I decided, was finding “flexible expectations.” I couldn’t be rigid in my thinking. I wanted to have standards and goals, but I needed to have wiggle room for the inevitableness of life not going as planned.
I had to become more resilient and strategic about my setbacks. I needed to have long-term perspective and not feel like individual moments in my life were the be-all, end-all. I needed to be less attached to a prescribed way to live.
You realize that in a world full of uncontrollable circumstances, the most powerful line of defense that you have completely in your control is how you think.
Your attitude.
Your perspective. Is that glass half-full or half-empty? You decide.
How you think is your resilience. Your ability to get back up and dust yourself off. The way that you know life is worth living, not only during the moments of joy, but also during the challenges and pain and heartbreak, and this is the reason you persevere.
Maybe my expectations never betrayed me after all. Maybe it was actually supposed to be one of my greatest teachers in life.
Around a year after my husband died, I sat down and made a list of “good” and “bad” from the past year. It had gone by in such a blur that I felt like I needed to go back over the details. I anticipated a pity party as I recalled all of the terribleness.
The bad: my husband died. Single.
The good: new friendships, a loving community who showed up for us when we needed them, trips to Japan and Italy and Denmark, saw an old friend for the first time in eleven years, more productive than ever with my writing, my kids were happy and adjusted little people, we had a nice roof over our heads, I loved my job that didn’t feel like a job, we were healthy, I worked on the election (even if it meant precinct walking with the toddler on my back as a single mother—but I did it!), and so much more. I kept thinking of new things to add to the list.
It was very telling. We tend to focus on the negative. My mind wanted to go back to the dark moments of the past year. But after re-reading the list, it was clear that the year wasn’t all bad. There were many bright spots in the hardest year of my life.
Mooji said, “Feelings are just visitors. Let them come and go.”
I try to always remember that.
It’s okay to feel terrible. You aren’t broken for feeling that way. You just can’t let yourself get attached to the feelings. There will be days when life feels too hard. You will feel pain and loneliness and fear that will make you suffer. None of it reflects who you are, nor are they any indication of what your future looks like. They are merely the temporary visitors.
When the feelings visit me, I acknowledge the pain. Hunker down. Maybe clear my schedule. Lower my expectations of productivity. Give myself permission to rest while I let the thoughts pass. Then I move on. It’s not that you ever forget the pain, but moving on is a way to compartmentalize it so it does not destroy you.
Eighteen months later, I’m a different person than who I was before my husband died. It’s not the life that I initially chose, but in many ways I am living a more intentional life with a lot more choice. There is some degree of excitement in what I call my “renaissance.” There are no rules. You just live as authentically as you can, with what you have, doing the best you can, and that’s it. No secrets.
Everything that you need to persevere is already inside of you, and this truth is liberating.
I’ve done a lot of things for attention that I’m not proud of. I’ve created drama. I’ve bragged. I’ve exaggerated. I’ve hurt people. I’ve hurt myself. I’ve lied and lied and lied.
No one wants to be labeled as an “attention seeker.” When people say, “She’s just doing it for attention,” they don’t mean it as a compliment. I knew this. And I knew that people said these things about me.
And still, I couldn’t stop.
I spend a lot of time around animals, especially cats. It’s easy to see which ones have experienced starvation. They have constant anxiety about food. They meow and meow when it’s feeding time. They scarf their portions down without breathing. If the bowl is left full, they’ll eat whatever’s there—even if it’s a week’s worth of food!
I was that cat with attention. I could never get enough.
But compulsive behaviors aren’t about what we’re consuming. Attention seeking isn’t about attention. Food addiction isn’t about food. Really, it’s about control.
When you’ve been starved of something, you develop a fear of losing it. You begin to cling to every morsel of what you’re desperately afraid to live without. Survival mode.
That’s what it was like for me: constant survival mode. I felt like, at any moment, I was going to be abandoned, left alone, forgotten. I fought to be noticed. Fought to be heard. Fought to be “loved.”
But despite my constant attention-seeking efforts, I never got what I truly wanted. I never felt loved for exactly who I was because I never showed her to anyone! I showed the world the person I thought it wanted to see, and I used other people as characters in my personal drama.
So that is the biggest irony: because I was so desperately hungry for love, I couldn’t have it. Because I so deeply craved attention, I repelled people away from me.Then, these experiences reaffirmed my biggest fear: there wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. So I’d grasp more, cling more, lie more.
Too often, people talk about attention seeking like it’s a character flaw. I see it as an addiction.
When we’re trying to fill a love-sized hole, it doesn’t matter what we’re trying to stuff into it: drugs, money, alcohol, approval, sex. If it’s not love, it won’t truly satisfy us. We’ll keep wanting more and more.
My journey of healing my attention-seeking patterns has been long and painful. One of the most painful things has been realizing that most people weren’t reacting to me the way I thought they were.
I used to brag loudly in public, imagining people around me admiring and envying me. Now, I realize that most of them were either ignoring me or annoyed by my antics.
I used to stretch every accomplishment, imagining people respecting me. If it was two, I’d say five. If it was 100, I’d say 300. If it was one minute, I’d say an hour. Now, I realize that most people either didn’t believe me or used my lies to reinforce their own insecurities.
I used to make a tragedy out of every pain and a drama out of every inconvenience, imagining people pitying me. Now, I know that most people either felt stuck in the cloud of toxicity that surrounded me (because of their own unhealed traumas), or they avoided that cloud like the plague.
The world, I’ve discovered, isn’t quite the place I thought it was.
I was so busy talking and talking, lying and lying, that I never sat down just to listen. And that is what helped me heal: looking within myself, looking around me, and embracing reality.
Attention seeking, for me, was a kind of self-protection. On my journey of healing myself, I’ve found that self-love and self-protection aren’t the same thing. I had to remove my armor and my mask. I had to face the truth.
Beneath my defense mechanisms, I found a fragile, wounded part of me that was traumatized by childhood experiences—by emotional starvation. But this part of me wasn’t fragile because of the wounds I incurred as a kid. It was fragile because I tried to protect it.
After I got hurt, I tried to hide myself away. I tried to create an elaborate fantasy world to protect myself from rejection and abandonment. I piled layers and layers of bandages on top of my wounds, but wounds need air to heal. I tried to keep myself safe, but I ended up suffocating myself instead.
I wasn’t lying and creating drama “just for attention.” I was doing it to survive. I was grasping for scraps of approval to replace my desperate hunger for real love, for authenticity, for happiness.
On the outside, it seemed like I wanted other people’s attention. That’s what I thought I needed too. But what I really needed was to pay attention—to be able to just exist in each moment without struggling. To be able to look at myself without running away. To look at people without being afraid of them. To have peace of mind.
Maybe you know someone who’s stuck in these patterns. Maybe that someone is you. However this applies to you, I hope to communicate one important thing: attention seeking is a symptom of a bigger cause.
It’s not something to be dismissed. It’s also not something to be judged and criticized. It’s something to be accepted, understood, unraveled, and forgiven.
Healing these patterns takes time. Every step along the way, it’s been difficult for me to invite reality to replace my delusions. It’s been hard to allow myself to be raw and open instead of trying to protect myself from pain.
But this healing journey has also allowed me to enjoy real affection: from myself and from others. And that has been worth all the hard work.
(Koh Chang, credit to Lucy)
Your peace garden 