When Sharing Your Problems With Other People Doesn’t Help
By Lucy Wickham
A lapse in disposition is the worst. You have been stable for so long, not letting anything bother you or knock you down, and then with one piece of information, one sentence, one event, one person, the mood that you have tried so hard to maintain for so long takes a devastating blow.
Everything is going right, and then suddenly it’s not. You can’t seem to calm down. You can feel your fists tense up. You want to tell the closest person about every feeling you’re going through and make a thorough complaint so that someone, anyone, can empathize with you and tell you everything will be fine. You know, the standard: People are mean. Life is not fair. Don’t let it get to you…
But what good does this do?
The person will probably think of how pathetic you are, and consider his/herself lucky for being much better off. These problems are not theirs. They’re yours. So don’t complain about them. We live in a world of comparison, so when we see someone struggling, some small part of us feels better because it’s a validation that we personally are doing something right; that we are not in fact the worst off, but instead, this person before us is.
Instead, take a step back and calm down. Be alone. Do whatever you need to do to relax and diffuse. Just don’t let it get to you. You’ve worked too hard to let one thing wreck your stability. Happiness is a fragile thing in this world. Let me know if you meet someone who is 100% happy all of the time. I’d like to meet them. Although, on second thought…that would just be damn annoying, wouldn’t it? Like a smack in the face. We expect people to have worries and fears and troubles and stress. To be unbothered by anything is to be un-human.
Want to know something? The people are not right anyway. Life is pretty fair. Life is so unfair that it makes it fair in the end. We all have issues to deal with in one way or another. We all have our own battles.
It is not the magnitude of the battle that is important, but how we handle it that counts. I always thought that because my battles seemed small, and I often felt overwhelmed by them, that made me weak. If you approach every struggle you have with as much strength as you can possibly muster, know that you will never look weak in my eyes. Gain your stability back and go forth, one step at a time.