Accountability and Encounters

I’m not sure, barring most of my childhood, I have ever made a decision that I have not questioned. Quite frankly, my “questioning” would be more aptly described as dissecting-maybe even interrogating myself in moments where I have wondered if I had made the “right” decision. Or perhaps what another decision would have looked like. I tend to go hard with that line of thinking-as I do with most things. Analyzing it until I’m not even sure what I’m looking at anymore. That is the gift/curse of the anxious personality-planning for all possible outcomes so that nothing catches us off guard. Then, when we are caught off-guard, ruminating about how we’ve gotten to this place, what steps we should have taken instead and how we can avoid this in the future. Another treasure of anxiety is that it can act like a cheap pair of sunglasses making everything you’re looking at the same shade of dark. And then sometimes it goes so far as to make you forget that you can actually remove the sunglasses if you don’t like the way something looks.

This week I had forgotten I could take my sunglasses off. I had put them on several weeks ago after a collection of disappointing moments. Nothing crucial happened. Just a continual building of small-ish disheartening things that all layered upon each other and became heavy. And, as those small things do, they take up space in your head and your heart and make your daily backpack very heavy. I was in a place where I was feeling the weight of the load but too mired down to take the sunglasses off.

It’s been my experience, if there is even a crack for it to get through, the light will be sent. It will be so bright that it will stop you immediately. It will be so bright you’ll realize how dim things have been and that YOU were the one who just needed to take the glasses off.

My light came in the form of a medical student who happened to be sketching something in her journal. We were preparing for our afternoon at work and she was using her downtime to do some artwork. It was astonishing-the details and the accuracy of the subjects she had drawn. I asked if I could see some of her other work which she happily shared. For someone that loves words as much as I do, I really had none to express what her depictions felt like to me. They were so intricate that it was apparent she had spent hours on them (which she confirmed she did). Yet it was more than that-they were full of something. Almost as if I could see a piece of her soul in them.

Medical school is extremely challenging and time consuming-I knew she would not have much time to spare on “hobbies” or extracurricular endeavors. So I had to ask her “how do you find the time to do this?” Her answer came like a lightening bolt through me.

“I have to” she said. “I can’t have my medical career without my artwork nor my artwork without my medical career. My artwork helps me remember how I feel when I’m doing certain things at school or here at work which is important in helping me decide how I want to feel for the rest of my life”.

How I want to feel for the rest of my life. Not “what I want to do”. How I want to feel. The accountability portion of that statement felt like someone knocked the wind out of me. Her days are spent asking the question “how do I want to feel”. My days have (mostly) been spent asking “what do I want to do, what does everyone else want me to do, what should I do, what am I supposed to do” along with a long litany of other questions that have very little relevance to focusing my energy on how I want to feel. The sunglasses were knocked off at that moment. I had forgotten that it was within me to switch the focus from the heaviness surrounding me to the lightness that actually is inside of me.

I had forgotten that sometimes things are quite simple. I insist on making them so complicated by endless analysis and examination that does nothing but waste energy. Just by taking accountability in a situation and realizing that there are still things I can do to help improve how something feels to me versus continually pointing the finger at external circumstances.

This one encounter shifted my perspective in seconds when I had been holding on to a dysfunctional (and really un-helpful) pattern of thinking about certain things for much longer than I care to admit! It makes me think of the quote that says “can you remember who you were before the world told you who you should be?” by Danielle Laporte.

I would add to that some food for thought…

Why do we believe what the world tells us? What makes us listen to that instead of taking accountability and just leaving it at:

1. Can you remember who you are?
2. Go back there