Self-Awareness is a Beautiful Thing

I don't know about you, but I have certain things that really bug me. For example, people who eat food out of bags that crinkle while I am trying to watch a movie. Like I know they can hear how loud their snack is. How hard would it be for them to just put the snack in a bowl and chew quietly? Everyone has things that bug them. Sometimes they are silly little things, and other times they are giant glaring things.

For me, I get driven crazy when people cannot seem to take responsibility for their choices. A phrase that bugs me to no end is "I just don't know how I ended up here." Well, sweetie, you didn't 'end up' anywhere. A series of choices were made and one by one those choices led you to this place.

The world we live in loves to play the blame game. We all do it from time to time. I know I am guilty of trying to shift the weight of my choices to an outside force at times. Total honesty is hard and can be very ugly, even when you are just being honest with the person in the mirror. But brutal honesty is where real change happens.

My father has spent most every conversation I have had with him blaming everyone else for the negative things in his life. If I had a nickel for every time in my life my dad overstated his value as employee insisting that a job didn't work out because the boss was stupid or didn't understand his brilliance. My dad has bounced from employer to employer when he was sober. Never, not once, have I ever heard my dad take responsibility for the choices he made. Choices to drink, lie, and steal.

I can remember warm summer evenings spent on my grandmother's back porch in Austin filled with conversations between my dad and his oldest brother. They would exchange stories of woe and how stupid everyone around them were. Neither of them able to see themselves as the common denominator in all of their failed ventures. Even when we have talked about the times my dad physically and emotionally abused my mother in his drunken rages, my dad focused on the things my grandmother and mother said or did rather than simply saying 'I messed up and let my rage mix with alcohol to create a monster'.

For a long time, my mother had the same incapability to see herself as the person who made the monstrous choices she made. Only recently, partially by force of circumstances, has she been made to take a long look in the mirror. What she has seen has at times been devastating, but it has also been healing. Looking her mistakes and acknowledging the truth has had a healing quality. She has been able to move forward avoiding repeating the mistakes.

I try to keep myself in a light of self-awareness. Mistakes are unavoidable. To be human is to error, but learning from those errors is the opportunity to eliminate repeating the same error over and over.