If This Is Wrong, I Don’t Need To Be Right

Someone I deeply care about in my life got a really shitty diagnosis two years ago, and I have spent a lot of that time with my opinions about how to navigate this disease. My path for him would have been more aggressive: clinical trials? Have you given up gluten? Wine? Added supplements? Have you read this book/website/article? Are you doing this? How about that?

But he isn’t doing this my way, isn’t operating from my checklist.  In other words, how he is managing this has felt inadequate to me, too passive. 

You know, wrong.

I know I’m not the first to talk, think and write about the perils of trying to change others. And yes, first there must come the understanding that we can’t change people, even those we love, or make people act differently.  But that’s only a half measure.  The second half, I am learning, is in not making them wrong for how they are.

And I am here to tell you there is no peace for me here, in this practice of making other people wrong in how they choose to navigate an illness – or any other part of their lives. In my case, I have found only despair as I have compared his choices to how I wanted him to do things. It has given me an uneasy sense of power: if I could just say the right thing, make the right suggestion … then he would do this the “right” way. I feel hooked, frustrated, guilty. I worry about the consequences of how this might go. I can feel the sticky, weighty feeling of this in my belly: it’s a dark and inky storm system, filled with noise and lightning and it’s bumping around from the inside. There is no peace for me here.

The last and crucial piece is where the storm subsides and leaves open sky: that is the place where I am able to let others not only not be wrong, but also be right. To accept not only that people are who they are, act how they act, decide what they decide, but also that it might be for their best: that acceptance may be the hardest work I’ve done yet.

What if we could cease and desist from the judgement, from our Fix-It-Up Chappie energy? What if we could hold a space of love and compassion and benefit of good intention? What if we could hold the feeling of watching a train derail in people we love, and get really clear on what our role is – or isn’t? What if we could trust in what another’s best looks like?

Where judgement begins, possibility ends.

Feeling like you’d like to explore the dance of your own judgement and possibility? Let’s talk.