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Lose the Outrage
“When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power.” Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
When I was young, I was full of complaints. A lot of things basically just outraged me. Teachers who gave me bad grades, people who didn’t invite me to parties, parents who didn’t buy me what I wanted.
It also extended to people who simply saw the world differently from me: they were always wrong, and they were doing it to piss me off. I could not separate my reactions to people from their actual intentions. I thought everyone else was focussing on me, when, actually I was always focussing on me. And ignoring others’ feelings, and probably pissing them off.
It was fun to blow off steam with my friends and just complain for hours about the entire outside world that was apparently conspiring to upset us and just didn’t get reality like we did. We didn’t use the term “woke,” because it was the seventies, but we meant much the same thing.
And so on. This is what it means to be young and un-self-aware. It’s pretty universal, and most people seem to get over it and become functioning mature adults who own their own feelings and reactions.
