Yesterday was a really nice day as a family. We had lunch together at Gran Hacienda, the Mexican restaurant, and we had ice cream afterward. Laura and I took a nap, and I played the Harry Potter board game with the kids, the Battle for Hogwarts. We played game six. So we had this beautiful day together. I didn't get time to film my crypto videos until after the kids went to bed, so I grinded out a couple of crypto videos and a quick music video. Then I took a little walk, took a shower, and got out at eleven o'clock. Laura and I often go to bed at around ten thirty, so it was a little later than usual, but we'd also taken about an hour-long nap.
When a small comment hits an old wound
So Laura says to me, "Wow, you were in the shower forever," or something like that. And I was. I was instantly triggered, and I was hurt. It was also obviously kind of irrational. What she said on the surface wasn't that big of a deal. But it brought up all the times when I was a teenager and my dad would be hollering across the house about how long I'd been in the shower, embarrassing me in front of everybody. And yes, sometimes I would take thirty or forty minute showers, which is pretty common among teenagers exploring their bodies. When Laura said that last night, it left me feeling hurt, and I went to bed upset. Then I woke up this morning even more upset. Sleeping did not change anything.
I'm glad that today, instead of what I often did in the past when Laura would say something that hurt my feelings, I handled it differently. To be fair to her, she just kind of stepped on a landmine mentally. It was something that had been planted a long time before, something she didn't really have anything to do with. But it blows up when she triggers it. Sometimes we look at it as our families having put buttons in us, or whatever you want to call it. I'm glad that I was able to explain that to her this morning, to explain why that comment felt very hurtful last night. And I was able to have a good cry and get it out.
The alternative to doing that is me being mad and going on a tirade, like in the past. Laura had hurt my feelings in similar situations with things she'd said, and I'd often bottled it up, sniped at her repeatedly, and then had a blow up. And one of the things I'd say when I'm angry is some single hurtful comment she made weeks before.
What I learned watching my parents
My dad did this to an even greater degree. One day my mom had a change of command back in the year 2000. She was a lieutenant colonel in charge of a unit, and she was leaving that unit to go take command of another one. There was a change of command ceremony, and she said offhand to my dad to suck it in, to suck in his belly, like, "You're making me look bad." Apparently this comment really hurt my dad's feelings. But instead of dealing with the hurt feelings, here's what happened: over the years my mom put on some weight after this, ironically the heaviest she'd been in her whole life, and my dad was nasty to her about being fat for years. Then finally, years later, it comes up that the offhand comment she made at her change of command had really hurt his feelings.
Now, we don't want to go overboard with this and be so sensitive that everything somebody says hurts our feelings, and then we're trying to control them through constantly being guilt-ridden and hurt and overly sensitive. There's definitely a delicate balance. For me, I was on the side of being way too armored up and withdrawn. What I've found has really helped with my wife is this: if I can just stick to being hurt and tell her exactly what she said or did that led to the hurt feelings, then that seems to help us have a very smooth relationship. What doesn't work well is if she says something that hurts my feelings and I don't deal with it right away. Then weeks later she doesn't even remember what it was, she doesn't really have a chance to immediately look at what was going on with her or the broader picture of it, and she's got all this other hurt in the meantime from my hurt.
The justice is in the healing
You've heard the saying, hurt people hurt people, which in my experience is exactly true. That said, as human beings we're incredibly resilient, and we easily have the ability to purge our hurt. To me, the justice is in the healing. Once you've been healed, once you've let go of the hurt, that's justice. It's as if it never happened. And in some ways, processing a hurt and then letting it go can even be better than it never having happened at all, because you're wiser. You've learned more. You have a broader perspective from which to have compassion and understand others.
I did a video on my vlog yesterday asking, what's the purpose of this vlog? As a creator, it gets so tricky between figuring out how to make videos that are real and authentic and meaningful for me. This is something I want to remember and take note of so I don't forget this process later. I want to share this process because, to me, I'm working on creating a world I want to live in, where people don't just bottle up all these hurts and fire nasty comments around at each other all the time. Part of living what I've come to believe is a heart-centered life is recognizing when that hurt, when that closure begins, and then doing the work to open up and let it go. Often just saying "I'm hurt" and having a good cry, or even getting a runny nose, can help purge a hurt. It's a lot like crying. That can help get it out and let it go.
What I've found, too, is that the next time Laura says the same thing about how long my shower was, if I've dealt with all that stuff from before through this process, then next time it might not have any impact, or it might have a lesser impact. This is where I've gotten to a point where I feel very clean in my life, where now I'm able to tap more into my empathic abilities and read and understand other people better. I can separate what's going on with other people versus what's going on with me, which makes it a lot easier to interact with everybody and to get my needs met. Because where a lot of us are hurt and frustrated is that we don't feel like we're getting our needs met.
Comparison, sample size, and getting perspective
Yesterday I was a bit frustrated. My mind tells me certain things, and because I'm not my mind, I'm not my body, I'm the consciousness that gives this life, I can notice that. We're all having one combined experience. But my mind will think that what I'm getting out of my work is not enough, that people don't value my work enough, that other people's work gets valued more. It tells me other people get more money for doing less work than I do, even though I get quite a bit of money for doing a few hours a day of work. So in reality, most people in the world are not having their work valued as well as I do. It's nice just to talk that out.
There's something in statistics called sample size. If you just randomly take five or ten samples, you can't conclude anything from that. Unless you've got hundreds of samples, you can't conclude anything from five or ten, except that it's random chance. What a lot of us do to make ourselves miserable is we'll pick a neighbor or a friend or a family member who has something we want, and that becomes our basis for comparison. For me, that becomes looking at some other creators who seem to have better sponsorships or better deals than me. That becomes my mind's entire basis for comparison, instead of the millions of creators who make nothing from what they do, who would look at me and say, "Wow, you make thousands of dollars every month doing two or three hours of work a day. You're getting very fairly compensated." Often it's talking these things out that helps me have a better, bigger, more expansive perspective. If you want to go deeper on how I think about money, work, and comparison, you can explore my Money playlist.
So I'm glad to have this to share on my vlog, because it's amazing how you can learn something and then forget it. You learn something, and if you don't keep using it, it fades. Twenty-five years ago I was reasonably fluent in German. I could travel around Germany, talk to people in German, order off a menu at a restaurant, and have conversations in German. Twenty-five years later, I have to look up basic words like sleep, like go or walk, words I took for granted back then. So I think it's great to have a vlog or a journal just to try to document what you learned, so that you can look back on it in the future.