Self editing. It's something I've had to learn. Restraint. Consideration before one speaks or types. A long, healthy projection of the consequences. It's good to have these. Assuming, of course, that you are aware that your thoughts and actions will have consequences. Maybe there are a lot of people out there who don't realize this. You should.
I know I have used this example before, but it works quite well.
I have cats and one of the big drawbacks to cats is that they are prone to puking. A cat will walk into the room, do a strange spasmy dance, then puke all over your floor/chair/shirt/or, sometimes, you. Once the cat has puked, it walks away like nothing happened. Well, okay, most of the time, the cat walks away, spasms again, and pukes more, but you get the idea. Once the cat has vomited, it no longer cares that the vomit is there. It's out of its system and that is all that matters.
The problem is, you as the owner of the cat still have to deal with the mess. It's this gross, festering nastiness on your floor/chair/shirt/you that you really can't ignore because it is way too gross. You have to clean it up. Now, if the cat possessed the ability to speak, it might tell you it was sorry for puking, but . . . that matters very little because it still walked away and you still have to clean it up.
When we are not calm and rational, most often what we say, do, and type is cat puke. We let loose with this huge nasty gross mess of verbage, everything we can to get it out of our system. Once our ranting is over, we feel better and we walk away.
However, like with the cat, we have left a mess.
As kind of a general rule, whenever you feel a lot of emotions about something in a negative way and you want to say or type many things about this, I want you to realize that you are basically vomiting on your audience/readers/friends/other loved ones. You are spewing all of your negativity onto them and leaving them with this barrage of emotional garbage once you're fine and decide to walk away.
I am completely guilty of this. In fact, there were some years when I was in more desperate straits that this was all I did. I just vomited up all the sadness and depression and bitterness onto other people. There have been times when I was so emotional about issues here on the blog that I just typed up a bunch of cat puke. I should actually probably go and delete those.
Thankfully I CAN delete them because they were just written and not spoken to someone. The things you say to people or yell at people or scream at people, those things can never be deleted. They stay with that person, slowly covering them on more and more emotional vomit until they finally drown under it. That's about the time this person decides they can no longer handle you. Ever again.
Unlike the cats though, we as humans have choices. We can choose NOT to allow our emotions to control us. We can choose NOT to verbalize every slight and scream about how unjust things are. And I'm not saying to bottle up all your emotions. You should certainly acknowledge them, but in a calm and respectful manner that doesn't make the situation worse for everyone. All that is going to accomplish is that everyone avoids you.
I'm writing about this because I've been intensely, almost insanely emotional about the latest GOP comments about rape. I find their comments to be laughably inaccurate and it scares me to no end that people elected them to hold office and make decisions for our country. I'm not even sure how that could happen. The whole thing makes me so heartsick I want to just go hide in the woods.
Because I am trying to NOT give in to my emotional triggers, I did not send off the crazyangry emails I wrote them. I did not scream about this on Facebook. I also, other than just this part here, did not blog about it for days and days and days. Although, believe me. I could have.
It's actually been difficult to NOT give in to my emotions on this issue. I've wanted to, OH how I've wanted to, but in the end, it wouldn't have helped anyone or educated anyone or changed anyone's mind. That isn't to say there aren't statements and arguments I could make about the issue that wouldn't change it. There are. It's just that when you're too emotional about an issue, your communication abilities get very, very low. You stop making valid points and mostly just say, "Hey, look at me, I'm a crazy angry person" over and over again. I'd really rather not be the crazy angry person.
So once I am more calm about the GOP and why we really should have never stopped sex education in schools, I'll blog about it. Of course, by that point, no one else will be talking about it so it won't feel important. Hah.
No comments:
Post a Comment