I Care What You Think of Me
Sometimes, I experience regret like a spear to the chest. A sudden pain that pushes me backward. The tip poisoned with anxiety, causing me frantically to undo, or attempt some kind of damage control.
I’ll forget about the spear until I bump into something, knocking it and shooting pains again throughout my body. “Why did I say something so stupid!? The embarrassment. It hurts!”
It’s not because I’ve compromised on my own values. It’s a fear that I will appear a certain way to other people. That I might look stupid, or immature, or a unattractive, but are things which, when I present to my audience of me, I really like a lot.
How tempting it is to dismiss this desire to appear competent and likeable to other people that I don’t really even know, like their opinions don’t matter to me. But despite what I would like, this is the case. I do care. And I don’t know that it’s possible without serious negative consequences to divorce yourself from that desire.
I think maybe that’s why it’s so important to have people around you that share your values, and value you as a human being, so that whatever regret you do feel or disapproval you fear is out of reverence for you and your own values. So, that the pain reflects your own standards, rather than the unprincipled whims of other people.
Comparing your inner experience to their outside behavior is going to lead to problems, clearly, since people are so adept at hiding the scars of their own emotional wounds. Never completely, but well enough to make you feel alone in it.
Having a real emotional connection with someone means having that empathetic access to their inner experience, with your respective emotional gate keepers taking five. More reason to surround yourself with good people!
I’ve become infatuated with the phrase “protecting your heart”, and have been thinking in those terms lately. And I think that it’s a tough business to get into when you’ve been used to having people hook into your heart, pulling you in all different directions all your life. Appealing to my own desire to be a good person, a good friend, a good son. When you pull those hooks out, the barb takes a bit with it and it hurts like hell, but with the honest warmth of an enlightened witness, those wounds can start to heal.
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