The other day I went to pick up two large packages at the post office. The lady helping me, Carol, wasn’t pleasant, but since the post office is infamous for rude workers I wasn’t alarmed. She barked at me for claiming my packages late, then ordered me to pull my car to the back door so she could bring them out to me.
Her and another worker, Sharon, arrived with my items in carts. Carol impatiently asked how I was going to get the oversized boxes in the car.
“I don’t know. I can get one in the backseat and the other in the trunk maybe.” I stated. It was true, I didn’t know how I was going to fit everything, but I was sure of two things:
- I would try my best to figure it out and
- If I didn’t I would just have to get a bigger car.
Carol was sure of one thing – that I was a nuisance. Shame on me for picking up packages at the post office.
She barked at me again “You know we don’t normally do this!”
She made a few more comments about how she had to get back to the office and fussed about leaving the door unlocked. Here this woman was, helping me, and making sure I felt bad about it. It made my blood boil. What got under my skin the most was that I couldn’t figure out how she was helping me at all. Standing there, and watching me think didn’t feel helpful, but maybe she would have felt worse if she had just left me be.
Either way, I had no idea this woman was doing me a favor so I gave her stern eye contact, thanked her for her generosity.
“I appreciate your help, you can just leave the boxes here and I will figure it out. Just put them on the ground.” My dismissive tone shooed her away with her empty cart back toward the door. A gentleman stopped by and helped me get one box in the backseat of my car and as I fumbled around to fit the last box in the trunk Carol stood outside the door and called out asking if I needed assistance.
“No. Thank you.” I could barely hear what she offered, but it didn’t matter because I was so angry I knew I didn’t want whatever she had. Now I had a point to prove – I didn’t need anyone’s help for anything and I especially didn’t want it from anyone who didn’t want to hand it to me.
I made my mistakes confidently. First, I tried to put the box in the trunk on its side.
Nope, too tall.
I took the box out and twisted it around, trying an angle.
Won’t work.
Maybe if I tried putting it in head first.
Dammit. Too long.
I sat the box on the ground and shamelessly thought out my next move. The solution hit me. I started ripping open the box as fast as I could, throwing pieces of cardboard and styrofoam in the backseat and slid the item in the trunk with ease.
To my surprise, Carol stood at the door and watched me the entire time. When I finally got the item in the trunk, she called out another offer – which I thought was an offer to take the cardboard trash I threw in the backseat of my car. She was barely audible, but it didn’t matter because again, I refused her assistance.
“You were so fucking busy, go back to your desk and don’t worry about me dumb hoe” I mumbled to myself and with a breath of pride and relief I closed the trunk, got in the car and sped off.
And I did my best to make it look like it was just another day’s work.
Still angry and venting to myself it became clear to me so many of the world’s problems.
Why do we expend so much energy trying to save the world when we don’t even know how to save ourselves?
How can we have answers to everyone’s problems when we can’t even find our own way?
Why is it so easy to be a self appointed noble representative of all things good when we can’t even do something so simple as be kind to a stranger for no reason at all?
All day long, my subconscious is being poisoned by a self-righteous ideology. It’s a pretty basic one actually; someone decided there was a right thing to do, a right way to think, and a right way to live, and started telling people all about it. However, no one can agree with what that ‘right thing’ is. The result is fighting over who is a good person and who is a bad person based on a set of rules that we can’t agree on.
Everyone who subscribes to this nasty ideology pats themselves on the back for being a kind, noble, loving and righteous human being – with delightful flaws of course because we’re all ‘human,’ right? We decide that anyone not like us is bad, and we feel great, smarter even, for being on our side of the coin, while everyone else is sadly on the other.
It all reeks of the following sentiment: your choices are always respected, so long as I deem them a worthy choice. And it doesn’t stop there.
The whole time, mental health has gotten so delectable, it’s almost absurd not to have one. People are miserable, burned out, and lost. Quite frankly it’s the only thing we seem to come together on; joining in piles to talk about how many mental health issues we have, and how lucky we are to still be able to keep up with the ridiculous demands of life in spite of.
I’m a working tired mom, but I stay strong for my kids!
Keep pushing!
I suffer from depression everyday, but I still manage to get my laundry done!
And instead of this being the red flag that begs the question “how the hell did I end up here in the first place?” it becomes the stand on which we start to preach about what others should do, how everyone should feel, and how the world should be.
Not once ever considering the fact that all of our “issues” are nothing more than a sign post that reads “You have not figured anything out. Because if you had, you wouldn’t have so many issues.”
No wonder the faces that have the most opinions tend to be the faces hiding the most pain. Because it’s way easier to work on someone else than it is to work on yourself.
It is easier to read a sad story in the paper and shame a crime you don’t understand than to put yourself in the criminal’s shoes to try to understand what drives a person to do such a thing.
It’s easier to stand up for a crowd in a crowd than to stand up for yourself alone.
It’s easier to want better for others than to make better happen for yourself.
Even though we know you can never change others, we still desperately try while running away from ourselves.
How can we be so passionate about working on the outside when we are not right on the inside?
If you can’t be kind to a stranger on a bad day, how can you know what’s good for the world? And even if you somehow did, how can you be equipped to deliver it? If you haven’t even mastered your own existence, who are you to master everyone else’s?
It is the state of Americans today that saddens me. It is a culture that thrives on bigger faster stronger and somewhere along the way we missed one important detail. . . that big things only come from many small things tightly wound together.
So no wonder there is so much hatred, divisiveness and unrest among us. No wonder we live in shame, guilt and fear. It’s in our hearts. We think we hide it with our virtue signaling but our ugliness shows when we snap at our children, lie to our loved ones, cut corners on ourselves, and honk and scream in traffic jams. We are not at peace within, yet we demand it from everyone we come in contact with.
What is the difference between our own ugliness and that of our alleged enemies? Is it only that they have more? Or maybe it’s pointed in a different direction than our own, because after all our own path is justified by our self righteousness right? I can be angry at the lady who picked up her heavy packages at the post office late, but he can’t be angry at dogs. And instead of addressing the anger within myself, I’d much rather address the anger in everyone else.
Ask yourself, where do we get our ugliness from to begin with? Does it come from others who are also ugly or do we grab it out of thin air? If our own ugliness is only a mirror of someone else’s, perhaps the most scary among us are just like us, only with a bigger bag of ugliness they carry.
So maybe, just maybe, the best thing we can do to change the world is to not spread so much cynicism ourselves, because you never know if you are someone’s last straw – if you handed over that last bit of ugly that turned a person from chronically grumpy to manic. And if that seems a far stretch to you, think about bad interactions you’ve had, how they made you feel and imagine that scenario played out enough times to drive you mad?
Now imagine how many good interactions you’ve had, how they made you feel and imagine that scenario played out enough times to make you float everywhere you go?
Most of the time it’s the small things in both scenes. And more often than not even the big things are just small things that happened multiple times – whether we replay it in our heads over and over again or live in it for years.
So I end this rant with the most simple message of all – if you want to change the world, simply change yourself.