Shitty Advice
Posting from: Tucson, AZ
The longer I live, the more I think I don't have any business dispensing advice. Really, no business whatsoever. But recently, I had some advice that now days later still seems quite good, if I do say so myself. Unfortunately, I am 99% confident that it was totally wasted on the person to whom it was directed- unsolicited advice usually is.
Some people don't want to solve their problems- they just want to yammer about them and rake in the pitying looks and "There, there, you poor soul"'s. I can't quite figure that out, but there it is. Maybe I was stuck in that mode myself a while. But this year I resolved to have a good year, and I think I've figured some things out. For whomever might find this useful, here is my shitty advice:
Shit has a tendency to happen. Shit does not have a tendency to unhappen.
A lot of people, maybe most people, get handed a big sack of shit at some point in their lives. Often it's not their fault. It's sad shit. It's scary shit. It's shit that makes you mad. It's shit that if all were just and right in the universe, some fucking bastard would die a slow and painful death for over and over again. You have every right to hang onto that sack of shit as long as you choose.
I hung onto mine for a good long time. Near the bitter end of an eight-year relationship, my ex-husband did me the biggest favor of my life by saying something that really got me thinking. He said that I liked to be angry. I thought that one over good and hard. I didn't like to be angry, but it was my normal mode of operation. Why was that? I realized that I was focusing on being right, not on being happy. My parents, an ex-boyfriend, my ex-husband all wronged me. I was right about that, damnit! And boy was I pissed! P-I-S-S-E-D! And I wasn't gonna let go until someone made it right! But when I realized that the only way to make it right was for those things to unhappen- and that was entirely impossible- I rearranged my priorities. Instead of waiting around for my idea of justice to never happen and being very miserable waiting for the impossible to inevitably not happen, I decided to see about the business of being happy from here on out.
And I found that the trick to being happy was not to carry my sack of shit around with me forever.
If you carry that sack of shit around too long it's going weigh on you. You're going to get tired. And then one day you're going to collapse and be buried under a big pile of shit. Or you can light that motherfucker on fire, hurl that flaming sack of shit as far away from you as you can, and run off in another direction without looking back. And then later when you find some of that shit has stuck to your shoes, take 'em off and keep going. And if some of it is smeared on your shirt, toss that off, too. Keep going, and one day you'll realize that even though you remember having that sack of shit handed to you and carrying it around, for a while now you've just been running around naked and happy. And that is when you start to notice all the good stuff you've been missing because all you could smell before was the stench of that bag of shit.
The longer I live, the more I think I don't have any business dispensing advice. Really, no business whatsoever. But recently, I had some advice that now days later still seems quite good, if I do say so myself. Unfortunately, I am 99% confident that it was totally wasted on the person to whom it was directed- unsolicited advice usually is.
Some people don't want to solve their problems- they just want to yammer about them and rake in the pitying looks and "There, there, you poor soul"'s. I can't quite figure that out, but there it is. Maybe I was stuck in that mode myself a while. But this year I resolved to have a good year, and I think I've figured some things out. For whomever might find this useful, here is my shitty advice:
Shit has a tendency to happen. Shit does not have a tendency to unhappen.
A lot of people, maybe most people, get handed a big sack of shit at some point in their lives. Often it's not their fault. It's sad shit. It's scary shit. It's shit that makes you mad. It's shit that if all were just and right in the universe, some fucking bastard would die a slow and painful death for over and over again. You have every right to hang onto that sack of shit as long as you choose.
I hung onto mine for a good long time. Near the bitter end of an eight-year relationship, my ex-husband did me the biggest favor of my life by saying something that really got me thinking. He said that I liked to be angry. I thought that one over good and hard. I didn't like to be angry, but it was my normal mode of operation. Why was that? I realized that I was focusing on being right, not on being happy. My parents, an ex-boyfriend, my ex-husband all wronged me. I was right about that, damnit! And boy was I pissed! P-I-S-S-E-D! And I wasn't gonna let go until someone made it right! But when I realized that the only way to make it right was for those things to unhappen- and that was entirely impossible- I rearranged my priorities. Instead of waiting around for my idea of justice to never happen and being very miserable waiting for the impossible to inevitably not happen, I decided to see about the business of being happy from here on out.
And I found that the trick to being happy was not to carry my sack of shit around with me forever.
If you carry that sack of shit around too long it's going weigh on you. You're going to get tired. And then one day you're going to collapse and be buried under a big pile of shit. Or you can light that motherfucker on fire, hurl that flaming sack of shit as far away from you as you can, and run off in another direction without looking back. And then later when you find some of that shit has stuck to your shoes, take 'em off and keep going. And if some of it is smeared on your shirt, toss that off, too. Keep going, and one day you'll realize that even though you remember having that sack of shit handed to you and carrying it around, for a while now you've just been running around naked and happy. And that is when you start to notice all the good stuff you've been missing because all you could smell before was the stench of that bag of shit.
posted by Kirsten | 9/15/2006 12:18:00 PM
2 Comments:
The great thing about shitty advice is that you can get it anywhere. It's more abundant in our universe than hydrogen.
I like it.
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