don’t have to be big
Hi, it’s been a while. I haven’t written to you since December, just before Christmas. A lot has happened since then, but a lot of happening keeps happening, so it doesn’t feel like much to talk about.
We all have pieces of our lives that are like this:
— — — — /BIG\— — — — >
from any point after the BIG thing, we can’t imagine what our lives were like before it. I mean, we might have photos or videos of what our lives were like, but that person don’t really resemble the person who’s looking at them.
They might as well be completely different people, twins we never knew we had, except in addition to sharing mothers, we share memories too. Take this dude, for example:
That guy was freshly divorced, working for an insurance company, and writing lots of fiction nobody will ever read. He took that photo with a camera that was high tech at the time (three whole megapixels!) but looks hilariously old now.
This was me, I guess, but I don’t really have a lot in common with that guy. I’m better at being a person, now. I’m less sure of many things than I was then, but more sure of different things now.
Here’s the same guy taking a very gauche mirror selfie 16 years later:
I’m a cat guy now? Unthinkable in 2006.
I’ve had a lot of those BIG things happen in the last few years. Some you know about. Some you don’t. But they all happen to all of us, and they’re all very BIG. How you handle the BIG things depends on the nature of the things, but the biggest part of that process, the most important part, is to learn that the person who made it through those BIG things deserves our praise. We must be our own biggest fans.
Even when you look at yourself in a mirror, you’re looking at your past self. You can never look at yourself exactly as you are at any moment because the light that makes your reflection bounces off you, and then the mirror, and then enters your eyes and then passes, eventually, into your conscious awareness.
The secret story of mirrors is that they are always a little out of date. They’re newspapers from a microsecond in the past. And, as anybody who’s been through a surprise BIG thing knows, even a microsecond can expand to such an enormous size that it takes up more space than a thousand entire days before and after it.
A very small thing can be incredibly significant, and a very large thing can be utterly ignorable. What matters more, the purring cat on your lap or the mountain on the horizon?
One of those could disappear and you would never notice.
The difference in time is tiny between the person in the mirror and the person looking at the person in the mirror, but that doesn’t make it insignificant. There is infinite power and change and transformation in that tiny microsecond, every tiny microsecond. Don’t worry if you missed one. The next one is coming just behind it. Every day, every hour, is filled with a billion chances. Be patient, and be kind to the person you were, the person you are, the person you will be.
Don’t go yet, I’m not done giving advice
This will be short, because I have to pee, but I want to share with you two things. One of them is a thing I learned to do, but that comes next. The first thing I learned was how to be satisfied with sufficiency. One reason I didn’t write one of these little newsletters is that I never felt like I had enough to say, until I realized that any amount I have to say is exactly the right amount. You’re reading it.
The second thing happened to me just today, and I wish I had learned it sooner, but you can’t learn everything at once, especially about yourself. It has to come in digestable portions or you’ll throw it all up.
Anyway, this is what I learned. My therapist knows that I tend to process things better when I write them, so the efficacy of this relies on me writing it down. It doesn’t matter what happens to it after I write it down. It’s the writing that matters.
I hereby revoke [everybody]’s right to have any say whatsoever on my moods, my opinions, my rights, my activities, or my work. They are officially and immediately banished from having any effect on me.
You are free to replace [everybody] with the person of your choice. I wrote it down for a few people, none of whom are allowed to place their opinions before my own. Well, they can do whatever they want in their own brains. This one is mine. I’m in charge here.
You are in charge of your own mind. Nobody else has any right to you.
I leave you with a song I love: