I sound like my dad

We had an early day yesterday traveling to Texas. After a nice hibachi dinner we turned in early. Unfortunately for my boys, I was the first one to fall asleep.

I say unfortunate because I have a pretty bad snoring problem. During the night, I heard Melissa and my oldest talking about it, him commenting that he didn't understand how she got used to the noise.

I had a brief thought flash across my mind. Just the briefest thought that, "You know, I could end their suffering by jumping off the ship tomorrow."

I don't follow these thoughts too deeply. You see, I have bipolar disorder and can cycle between depression and mania on a regular basis. Thankfully, medication and therapy have helped me take an observer role and just watch the thoughts come and go. When I see this kind of internal dialog, I say to myself, "Ah, there he is. My old friend. What secrets do you want to share today?"

I noticed two things from this brief event. First, it's interesting how we can be moving through our day, have one discouraging moment and completely torpedo the rest of it. Second, it's interesting how quickly the feeling can lift if we take a compassionate observer role towards it.

If you're like me, you may have high expectations for yourself. We want people to think well of us and when they don't, we freak out. We can't have people being disappointed with us. 

I think this stems from black-and-white thinking. We haven't figured out how make peace with the gray. With the idea that there aren't good people and bad people. There are just people with a mix of good and bad traits (more on the idea of good and bad in a later post).

It's probably easier to bucketize people as good and bad because once we've categorized them, we don't need to give them any more attention. Just avoid the bad people. Or talk poorly about them to boost your own sense of goodness. That's why when we're confronted with our own "badness", we wonder if we've placed ourselves in the wrong category.

Just because we have flaws doesn't mean we're bad. It just means we can't be categorized into one of two buckets. We transcend categories and are a beautiful tapestry of shades.

So, rather than jump to "I'm a bad person", we can tell ourselves, "I'm a piece of artwork with interesting brush strokes." With all the love and compassion we're learning to grow into.