Lucid Thoughts

After a particularly disturbing conversation today, I scribbled down a few thoughts the exchange had left me with. I wrote them because they were just going around (and around) in my head and writing stuff down tends to clear it from my mind. Don’t bother reading them; just skip to the section afterwards.

• Leave me be.
• Stop with your dreams about me already.
• Desist from endless speculations about me.
• Keep your thoughts about me to yourself.
• Don’t bother me with your endless questions.
• My private life drama is mine alone so let’s keep it that way.
• What I do with my time/energy/mind is my own business.
• Where I move, what I say and how I dress is up to me.
• I’m happy to decide what I should and should not write.
• Your concerns are yours and my concerns are mine.
• Not that I have any right to ask this of you, but please, if at all possible – let me be!

Then, feeling much better, I picked up a book (Loving What Is by Byron Karie) and immediately happened across the following quote from Epictetus:

“We are disturbed not by what happens to us,
but by our thoughts about what happens.”

And I thought to myself, blooming heck – how appropriate is that! And then I wondered if I was disturbed by that thought. And I decided that I was, but that it was a beneficial disturbance. And so I smiled and wrote the above.

Then I picked the book up again.