There’s a voice I’m noticing more and more, in myself, that I’m calling “I’m Right and I’m Mad.” It shows up all the time.

(obv not the same phrasing but a similar feeling.) Here’s what this voice says:

1. We’re suffering. (“we” meaning, me and all the little parts of me, I guess)
2. I know a way out of suffering.
3. Everyone should just listen to me and then we wouldn’t be suffering.
4. Because everyone didn’t listen to me, all this isn’t my fault.¹

Here are some simple ways it shows up, past and present:

• my dad asks me to help with yard work. I feel obligated. I hate it. “we just shouldn’t be doing all this landscaping! if we didn’t have all this dumb ornamental stuff, we wouldn’t have to do any work! It’s not my fault!”
• I’m playing baseball. I strike out at a key moment and I feel like I’ve let everyone down and it’s terrible. “This was a dumb idea, I don’t even want to play competitive sports, I should just quit and then I won’t suffer like this.”
• we have to pay for unexpected car repairs. “This is dumb; I never even wanted to have a car. Not my fault.”
• we go to the beach and sand gets everywhere. “I didn’t even want to go to the beach. Not my fault.”

A couple interesting points:

1. Why do I care if things are my fault?
2. This voice doesn’t actually have an answer for everything. E.g. “Just don’t have a car”?? with small kids in a small US city? That would make the bills a little easier and so much of life so much harder!
3. It might actually be worse for me to distance myself from things that happen in life.

alignment

I think about work being more or less “aligned” sometimes. Aligned with what? I don’t know, aligned with you. Aligned with what you like, want, love, care about, how you want to be, your visions, your dreams. Very aligned: a doctor who likes figuring out tricky medical cases and loves seeing people get healthier. Not aligned: a doctor who’s doing it because their parents said they should, and now they want to get rich enough to keep up with the Joneses. This is not a brilliant insight here.

But it’s relevant to me now, because the “I’m right and I’m mad” voice is inherently un-aligning. When I work in my garden now, it’s pretty aligned: I like my plants. When I worked with my dad as a kid, it was pretty un-aligned, but then I made it more so by declaring “I want no part of this.” This wasn’t my idea, I would just not have all this landscaping, forget it.

There could be a viewpoint that pushes me towards more alignment with that job: “I’m doing this as a gift for my dad, who I love. And it is nice to see these plants; it’s not a total waste of time.” That would require not pushing away the work, or the suffering; not saying “I wouldn’t set up my life like this so I shouldn’t be responsible for doing the work.”

responsibility

Just always go toward alignment! Easy as that?? Hmm. It is not easy to take a problem that you might push away, and instead make it yours.

I can’t stop thinking about “Resentment is responsibility gone rotten” (despite the therapyspeak; the core idea I mean). One natural conclusion of this whole post could be “I have to take more responsibility for my life.” No, even better: “My life will be easier if I take more responsibility for it.” Easier! What?! But that’s sort of the inevitable conclusion here. If I find myself with a problem, like my dad wanting me to do yard work, and I can transmute it into “I choose to do yard work as a gift to my dad”, I can do more work but suffer less. The feeling might be less of “stuff just happens to me” and more of “on some level, I chose this.”

That is so counterintuitive that I am both rejecting it ferociously AND actually kind of intrigued. It’s so counterintuitive that I haven’t overthought it 100 ways, which means it might actually help.

Now the only hard part is, how to actually do it. In the moment, when I have a new difficulty, how to say “yeah I actually am partially responsible for this and choose to take it on and align myself with it”, not “this sucks and if I had my way I just wouldn’t do it.”