“We Detach From Difficult Personalities”

Most of you who have been reading my blog know that I’ve been facing a few challenges lately. While my overarching intention is to continue to uncover and discard long-established behavior and thought patterns that no longer serve me with hope of long-term benefits as the result of short-term work, some benefits to this whole project are showing up now. One of them is that I’ve noticed (and I used to think I was really good at this but) I seem to be able to meet all these life challenges with a markedly higher level of serenity. Even when the “monkey mind” is chattering away, there seems to be a calm, stable part of me who’s just riding the situation out and allowing me to simply do the next right thing.

I don’t want to diminish or downplay the impact all the life challenges have had over the past couple of– there’s the thing– I think to myself, “Wow, it’s really been a rough couple of weeks dealing with everything that’s been going on with Mom” and then I realize it’s really been like that since Dad died but then I remember the months before Dad died and how tough that was and right before that was the year directly following my split with Adam and the realizations that came with that and that was sure tough so I think didn’t it really start with that? And then I remember what it was like being married to him and realize that it was actually really tough for all those years of his sneaking around and fucking strangers and stealing drugs and beating me up and so on and so forth… And the rough stuff didn’t start with being married to a sociopath; I had, after all, just come from a war when I met him and before that yada, yada, yada, and traumatic childhood blah, blah, blah.

So yeah, life’s been tough for a good long while, maybe forever. And for that reason, it was particularly nice when, after I finished a killer shoulder workout today, I looked over and saw the sign on the side of an old building in downtown Birmingham that said, “Magic City Grill” and from the patrons I saw sitting in the booths by the windows, I knew it was my kind of place!

I went in and paid my $10 and bellied up to the buffet. I got to choose from a steam table of all my favorite comfort foods like black-eyed peas and mac-n-cheese and fried okra and mashed taters and fried chicken and pork chop and corn bread and the list goes on. I took my heaping plate with me to my table near the fan, looked out the window at the passers-by, said a prayer, had a nice conversation with the man in the booth next to me and thought to myself, “Man, this is really nice.”

As I am wont to do, I took a selfie to capture the joy of the moment and posted it on Facebook with a comment about how much I loved this kind of food. Lot’s of people gave the little blue thumbs-up or commented on how much they love it too. It’s nice to connect with people from all over based on a common joy.

Then this queen from SoCal commented with an emoticon of the fucking little smiley face guy retching. Then this comment:

Keep posting pictures of yourself with this kind food and telling yourself it’s “ok.” My arteries are hardening with each one.

 

First off, her use of quotation marks lets me know she doesn’t understand anything about how to use this form of punctuation. Incidentally, she, like half the people on my Facebook friends list, are people I have no idea how I’m supposed to know them. One click on her homepage let me know the SoCal part and that he’s involved with The ManKind Project so evidently I met her during my brief tenure with that dangerous cult. The thing is, only a short time ago, I would have had to somehow engage her on her shitty comment. But now I know better. Now I know that Facebook not only has a “unfriend” button but also a “block” button. It’s easy as one-two-three.

I once attended a support group for business owners. They actually provided me with some very good tools. All artists are business owners. Perhaps the biggest take-away I gleaned from that meeting was something they listed among the list of “tools” they read in the beginning. They said, “We detach from difficult personalities.” Man, it seems so simple. How could it have taken me this long?

Click on the person’s name. Go to their homepage. Click on the word “friend,” scroll down to “unfriend.” Click. Or even better: go to the three little dots on the right of their wallpaper. Click. Scroll down to “block.” Click.

It’s easy as one-two-three!

See y’all tomorrow.