Unemployment

Anticipate Rejections – Normal And Part of Our Human Condition

Self-Care Tip:  Anticipate rejections and some in-between times, you will be chosen.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10000 ways that won’t work.

-Thomas A. Edison

Foto einer Glühbirne (an),

In today’s economic climate, we are given more opportunities to seek employment elsewhere.  Of course, “opportunity” is loosely used here and it might sound like I was playing Mad-Libs, a super game in fact so I’m okay with that.

But whether we are applying for employment or asking to be someone’s friend, or like Edison, playing – these various arenas of rejections are normal. They may feel particularly personal, but that’s a distortion.  They’re part of the human condition.  They come to us who do what we love, who do for well-evaluated intentions, who put out with courage and who put in 10,ooo hours.  They come to us who haven’t found what we love, who work for a martyrs salary or who do not have the privilege to go toward their temperament.

Rejections are.  They are like the surface tension, the space between water and air and they hold us together.

We love success and too often are like Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates.  We forget from sunset to sunrise what a day’s labor brought us before.  We forget easily.

But with Magic and Love, we can lose ourselves once again in the experience of doing what we love to do despite it.  We can remember better with the help of rejections.  Remember all sorts of things.  And without turning this into a script from Cheers, we can still say that rejections become the best parts of our life’s experience.

Those darn personalizations though, those distorted perceptions, those rejection-clots that cut off circulation – if it becomes that the space between water and air gets too thick, if rejections seem life defining, tell your physician about it.  It’s not “just the stress.”  It’s from the brain and might be a symptom of brain illness, much like achy joints and arthritis go together.

Questions:  How are you able to use the rejections you received to be friendly to yourself?  Please tell us your story.

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When Suicide Almost Made Sense

Hello world. Please comment.

nancy says:
November 17, 2010 at 8:01 am (Edit)
I could write a book….but suffice it to say, to the day she died, my mother never even told her best friend that I had had a breakdown and was on medication, my sister said I couldn’t possibly be a Christian and be mentally ill, people at church have told me that they actually walked across pews to avoid talking with me when I was sick, and, even though I’m off all medications but Klonopin and seeing a therapist only every three or four months “just to keep in touch”, I can’t go anywhere or meet anyone new without feeling as if I’m wearing a sign saying “Mentally Ill” around my neck. My attitude about people with emotional problems? God bless them…and I pray that they have a really good connection with HIm. It (and the love of my family) is the only thing that kept me alive.

Question: aside from the obvious nausea and anger that stigma and prejudice bring on, what do you have to say? Please tell me your story.

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Let It Go and Keep Going

Like gripping a blade the reflex may be to grip harder.  When to let things go when it feels like we can’t…  How do we, if it is still active in our lives?.  Something negative but still going on with no end in sight?

A woman comes to me anxious and depressed.  She looks older than her age.  She cries a lot talking about what she is ashamed of.  Staying with her emotionally abusive husband. Probably having sex with him though she didn’t want it.  Unable to leave because she didn’t have money, job, or family support.

This woman I mentioned, she is courageous.  She has tried for years to find herself again and still tries again and tries another time, times times.  She talks to her kids about it and they say she should never have married him.  She talks to her friends and they sigh and heap insults against him.  She talks to God.

She comes to me.  Why she comes when she does?  She found the courage to ask for help one more time, times times.  She takes medications.  We spend 6 months together before she starts responding to the combination therapy and each day she had the courage to wait another day times another.  Her face looks younger, slowly, like looking through an album backwards over the next weeks.  She starts talking about doing more than making it through the day.  More fits into her hopes than survival.  Like Mary Poppins‘ travel bag, she keeps pulling more out of her life than she ever thought it had space to hold.

One day about 1 1/2 years later, she came to me with a secret smile, holding her purse like a stolen cupcake.  The door closed to our room and she pulled out her dog.  She said, “I’d like you to meet my best friend in the whole world.  I just love him so much!”  She is a woman who found courage to love and be loved.

I am in awe and humbly wonder after her.

Remember again the addict who so often leads us in this example.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

Serenity Prayer

We surrender when we can, when we think of it, when awareness dawns, the things we cannot control.  It might take a higher thought to “let go” of what we cannot control.  When we are able to do this, we are larger in a sense than the moment.  The recurring yucky events are seen more objectively and less personally.  We are more knowing.

It takes us back around to how we define ourself.  Our spirit.  Our essence.  This woman, she found it.  She found she was more than her circumstance.

“How do we surrender what we cannot control?” you ask.  Ask yourself.  I have my answer.  I hold my answer in my mind’s eye, like a Swiss bank account.  My most precious treasure in the care of The One,

…where neither moth nor rust does corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.

This woman, she is courageous.  She journeys without being defined by the events.

Self Care Tip #36 – If you can’t control it, let it go and keep going.  Be a friend to yourself.

Question:  What do you think?  Please tell me your story.

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This Side of the Fence

When taking care of ourselves, we are taking care of others.  It might be counterintuitive.  There is a circle service can turn us in.  I give to you, I take care of you, I start realizing at some level that I’m not being taken care of, I hold you responsible now for my neglect, and then around again.  Some support this pattern from cultural influences.  Some with intuition.

This can be a place we find ourselves in our relationship to anything or anyone.  Employment or even unemployment.  We may find ourselves saying things like why me, or feeling like we are selected out by some greater force to suffer.  Any time self-reflection whispers anything about the word “victim,” look for the “circle-walk.”

Now some listening to this might say service is the best thing of their lives and imply that without service, life isn’t right.  Sure.  However, that’s not my argument.  Mine is that taking care of one’s own self is also a form of service to others.  In fact, let’s boldly put taking care of one’s self at the top of the service list.  Standing up there can feel awkward, presumptive, selfish, unChristian.  What does it feel like for you?

I’m told 😉 this is hard.  It is.  We just try our best.  Every day we try again.  Every moment we remember, we try.  My husband often says, “God is a God of second chances.”  I think He wants us to treat ourselves with as much courtesy.

In addictions therapy, we tell the addict that a relapse isn’t a failure, it is part of the road to recovery.  When we take care of ourselves, we may find ourselves up against any number of forces, including patterned negative behaviors. We can learn from the brave people fighting the disease of addiction. When we don’t treat ourselves well, we are not a failure.  Rather we are on the road to becoming a better friend to ourselves.  That also takes courage.

Onward and upward my friends!  Let me know what you think.

Self Care Tip #28 – Look at your own side of the fence.  Be a friend to yourself.