Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Pick Your Battles..

It seems lately I have been fighting one battle after another. I can’t seem to get anything done without a fight. Then there are the battles we fight just in our day to day life. It can be hard to pick which battles to bother with and which ones we will surrender to.
I never liked to SeeSaw when I was a child. My brothers thought it was fun to get me going, really enjoying the thrill of going up and down, then they jumped off and I would go crashing to the ground, hard. They left me scared and hurt on numerous occasions. (And they wonder why we aren’t close?!) It seems simple to say "why didn't you just stop getting on the SeeSaw with them?" Because they could be very convincing and/or threatening. And I really wanted to believe they liked me, maybe even loved me, enough not to hurt me again. I still want to believe that about everyone I care about. I still don’t like being on a SeeSaw and yet that is what my life feels like. The constant up and down. The feeling that things are going smooth and steady, then the unexpected, jolting crash to the bottom.
And I think one of the things that carries over from that type of life experience is that I absolutely hate it when my feelings are ignored or trivialized. When someone hurts me and discards my feelings as though they aren't important. And it is not something I get over quickly. Anger is a flashpoint, it is usually a surface emotion that I can get over fairly fast if it is just something I am mad about. But hurt runs deeper than that. It also tends to turn into resentment. So try as I might, I am not always able to just "let it go" if it is something that hurts my feelings. I don't always get to pick the battles either. Sometimes I am thrown in the middle of it wether I want to fight it or not.
I am still tending my bruises from the latest SeeSaw crash. I am not up to fighting any battles for myself or anyone else. So I am declaring a "No Battle Zone" for a few days, wish me luck!

1 comment:

Nancy said...

may the force be with you.