This morning I woke up after a good sleep and with an empty and open mind, picked up my phone to check my feed. An introduceyourself post with $110 and counting caught my eye, and this post relates to the words and a couple of questions I found inside...
The post, linked above, discusses 'self', and contains many questions that could be summarized by:
If this or that happened, or that change was made, would you still be you?
To these questions I answered whole-heartedly with a 'yes', but it was the following that raised my thinking...
But what about the identity others create about yourself...
Do
estheir thoughts and perspective matter?
Or [is] your self-created identity is the only one that counts?
To these questions I wish to answer, yes, and no, no, and yes.
To wade through life not caring, or even considering what others think about you will probably place you in the ignorant egotistical dickhead camp by many.
To tip-toe timidly around people each day acting, or trying to act in a way that you think will gain the most appreciation is a recipe for mental health disasterville.
If you will allow me a couple of examples, past and present.
For many years I spent much time wondering about the thoughts of my child's mother and grandmother, and what they thought of me - which I presumed was mostly negative. This was proven to be the case many times, but that's not the point here. The point is, when it's not happening in front of you, you cant be considering and expending energy around these thoughts, as I found out as my mental health deteriorated.
Skipping forward to the last couple of days...
A conversation with a bid-bot owner in which I incorrectly calculated rewards... 'I deal with this all day, I'm getting tired of it being spread around'.
A message from a user who'd assumed he was missing from a list I'd produced recently that started with 'so...you didn't include me in stellas delegation analysis'.
A conversation with a user the other day regarding my 'asking' for delegated Steem Power.
A (5 hour in the making) analysis post for utopian which was met with 'that's one query, lots of data, boom, done'.
In all these cases, at certain points in time (before I was even aware) these people were negative in thoughts towards me. Do their thoughts and perspective matter? Yes, and no.
Yes - Understand their point of view when it's given, take the lessons, see the positive.
No - Don't let any of this linger around in your brain or make you act in a way you think are in other's best interests. You see, the thoughts of others are just 'thoughts' - no words, no action. How can you spend any amount of time reasoning and acting according to something that doesn't 'exist' yet?
It seems that the best place to be is somewhere in-between. In-between not caring about other people's image of your 'self', and caring too much. And if you do find yourself 'in the middle' for a good part of your life, I suspect happiness and inner-peace will be joining you along the way.
When you give too much weight to the opinions and thoughts of others, you're basically telling your self to fuck off.
Now, when I think and write (thanks to Steemit) about this topic, I'm reminded of this video which i'll occasionally 'use' as a re-balancing exercise.
Thanks for the read, I'd be interested to hear your views.
Apologies for the lack of pie charts this morning, have a super day!
Asher 