Transcript

Independence · Wanzology

Tah rah-rah Boom deeyay! Tah rah-rah Boom deeyay!!! Hey, what's going on? It's Wednesday, and if it's Wednesday, then you know it is time for another episode of WANZOLOGY!! I am your host, The Wanz, and right about now, it's um, the day before Independence Day. So I thought I'd talk about being independent and what that actually means. What is independence? Because we can be reliant on so many things, and we should be reliant on some things, but there are other things that we should be independent of. There are some people we should be independent of. Now, as most people know. US history dictates that the colonies wanted to break free from King George and therefore started a revolution and won their independence. Hence, the documents like the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. How we supposed to govern ourselves and not. But what is it when it comes to human relations? What is independence in a relationship? A friendship I. A stepfamily adoption. Well, independence can mean a whole bunch of different things. I swore to myself when I was a junior in high school, I swore that if I went to college, I was gonna go someplace where my folks could not get me. I wouldn't be under the thumb of my parents. One of the main reasons I chose Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington USA is because it was a good 110 miles away from my parents with a mountain range in between. There's certain times of the year, I'm pretty sure they're not gonna try to dip on over to see what Michael's doing. I needed to be independent. At 15, 16 years old, I was dying, dying to prove myself to my parents. They had spent all this time teaching me about right and wrong, this and that, but most of my time was spent in front of the television set at home 'cause I really couldn't go anywhere. So fast forward about 30 years. Relationships are very, very interesting, and here's why. Whether you are in a romantic relationship or a friend relationship or a workmate relationship, it doesn't matter, what it means is that you have to hold your own ground when it comes to your person, your self (two words). If you don't. The odds of you becoming a follower are great. Nobody wants to be a follower. Well, maybe sometimes, but not you, you know what you're doing, right? You know lots of things, right? Oh, that's right, that's you thinking those things. You know things because you are thinking, I know some things. The universe may have different plans. It may throw circumstance at you to prove whether you actually do know what you say you know. In times of crisis, will you A) quickly ascertain the situation and figure out a response rather than a reaction. B) quickly ascertain the situation and look at whoever is next to you to see what they're doing. C) quickly ascertain the situation and not knowing what to do. You are frozen with fear because you've never been in that situation before, or D) all of the above? D is the correct answer because it depends, as do most things in life. I'm not specifically sure who I'm speaking to at the moment, so I'll just say it this way, we all handle pressure differently. We all handle relationship stress differently. We handle interpersonal relationships, and that means like, oh, you were going to get your cart, but the guy who wrangles the cart in the parking lot won't let you have that cart, you have to go get another one because he's taken that one inside, drat! Or, you wanna merge onto the freeway, but there's someone in the lane that you wanna merge to and they won't slow down. You could speed up or you could slow down a lot and get behind them. These are some of the decisions that if you're an independent person you don't have any trouble with. But if you're not an independent person, you might get a little flustered. This person won't let me in. What am I gonna do? The on-ramp is narrowing. Oh my God, what am I gonna do? BRAKE!! And now the cars behind you have to BRAKE, and the cars behind them BRAKE. And before you know it, you have a traffic slowdown, if not rush hour, bumper to bumper, nobody's moving. You couldn't be independent and just say, you know what? I'm gonna look at this person and I'm gonna get their attention. I'm gonna try to figure out that if I speed up and they speed up too, well that means I should slow down because I'm supposed to yield when entering the freeway. That's independent thinking. What do I do? What do I want to do? What should I do? What could I do? Each one of those has a flip side, which is not do you can do or not do. Now, the trick is nobody tells us if doing something is the answer or not doing something is the answer. This is stuff you navigate every day, but if you're relying on someone else to give you some kind of idea what you should do, well, I don't think that's independence. I actually think that that's dependence. For whatever reason, you don't trust yourself and that's cool as long as you realize it. 'cause if you don't, there are so many opportunities that you may be missing. And when I say opportunities, I'm not being specific. I'm being very general on purpose. 'cause I don't know what you might be missing. I just know that you are because you're preoccupied with that stuff that goes on on the outside. What do I look like? Who thinks what? Why are they moving away from me? Doesn't anyone do this? Being independent means that you trust your decision-making process. You trust how to get from A to E and every letter in between. You know how to do it even if you haven't done it before, you have a really good idea of how to do it, but do you believe in yourself enough that you can do it? Could do it? Should do it. What I just said is the pathway to overthinking, because if you're sitting there thinking about something, you're not acting on anything. How are you gonna get to the end of whatever process you're in? If you're stopped and thinking? Now I'm not talking about, you know, you're thinking for two or three minutes. This is milliseconds. If it gets to the point where it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 seconds, that's not good. You are not being very independent if it takes you four or five seconds to figure out what you're gonna do next. I mean, you always have some idea. The benefits of being independent are good and bad. Bottom line, all it really means is you are responsible. You are responsible for whatever choices you make, the success, the failure, all yours, all of it. So what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do to gain your independence? What are you getting independent from? I can think of a couple of relationships. I was under the thumb. I had built myself a pillar of obligation to stay regardless of what's happening, regardless of how I feel, stay, because that's what my mom and dad would do, they would stay and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Tell you what, in reflection and a little bit of therapy, actually a lot of therapy, I found that I painted myself into a corner on many occasion. I did not take the opportunities to be independent for one reason or another. Either I was afraid of being judged or somebody would find out and they'd make fun of me, or my parents would find out and totally disapprove, and then I'd get punished. Oh my God. But what it led me to is a large facet of my personality is very insecure. Sure, I can go out, I want to go see ‘X’ b and play or go to a concert, buy a ticket, and I go. I don't have to wait for anyone else. I am pretty self-sustaining when I'm by myself. I can do that. Some people can't. And I'm not saying it's bad or good, if you can or can't. I'm just making the distinction between independence and not independence. It's not a light switch. It's varying degrees. So what would work for me may not work for you. A decision that I would make for myself is not, may not be the right decision for you. We have different lives, which is cool. Standard operating procedure. Every human, all 9 billion of us, we all have different paths that we walk. Most people that I run into up here in the upper left-hand corner of the United States are pretty independent. They run their own game. They're doing their own thing, but there are those who can't go anywhere without a companion of some sort. They can't just take themselves out just because. They think it's awkward. To them, it probably is awkward. Why aren't you those people that I was just mentioning, why aren't you leaning into that discomfort? Discomfort is a doorway to learning something, always has been. Remember, remember elementary school when you were in like fourth grade and you swore up and down, prayed to whatever deity you could so that the teacher would NOT call on you to answer a question she asked to the class. I remember that. There are many a times it's like, I'm looking around at everybody else to see who's got the answer. I have AN answer, but who has THE answer? I don't know, I don't know it all, I'll just wait. And that served me well for a while. But once you get older, the competition is different than being in a classroom. The competition, the nature of it, the drive of it is in between your ears. How do you get independent from that? Spoiler alert, you can't. So you'll have to deal with yourself (two words), so that you can project outside yourself (one word) that everybody else sees. The long and the short of it is this, if you're looking to other people to validate you and what you want, how you feel, you are not very independent. This is not a concrete bunker of a container, these are just parameters. I mean, these are just invisible fencing. We will stop ourselves from doing that very thing that we need to do and find all kinds of reasons not to do it. Procrastination. Not everyone is like that. I'm like that. It's late afternoon right now, and I wanted to be doing this podcast episode this morning, but things didn't work out that way. They didn't. But I'm still responsible for those choices that I make and those things that I haven't dedicated what I should dedicate to them, well, I'm gonna have to either make that up or take the consequences. Independence can be a fallacy. It can be a dream. It can be the stuff that your imagination contrives when you don't feel quite up to snuff in this wonderful existence, independence is basically you going where you go so that you can do what you do. I encourage you to encourage someone else to be more independent. It's great to come together, I’m all about the teamwork stuff, right? I love the buddy system. It's always great to have a buddy. That way you don't have to do stuff alone, but don't make it so that you have to have a buddy or else you won't do something. Once it starts affecting your choices, this lack of independence, you feel more comfortable when you're with other people than when you're by yourself. When's the last time you took yourself to a movie in a theater? When's the last time that you went hiking by yourself? When's the last time you took yourself out to dinner and ate at the bar so you could watch the TV and everything else. Independence, the ability to do what you want because you're aware of the consequences, you're confident that you can make a choice, and you have an invested too much in the outcome. You're waiting to see what happens. That's what life is about. While you're waiting, you're still making decisions. And I'll leave you with this. A buddy of mine says all the time, “Life is what happens while you're busy making decisions.” When you're done listening to this and you go in the kitchen and you open up the fridge looking for something to eat, but you didn't go with a purpose, so you don't really know what you want, close the door, stand in front of the fridge, and just think for a second and when you open the door. Your thoughts will be different because you already thought those thing, now you're thinking these things and these things might be less dependent on others than those other things. Maybe they're more, it's not for me to decide, it's for you to experiment with. You ever go to the supermarket hungry, everything looks good, and you still can't decide what you want. It takes you more time than it should, and you didn't bring a list. Being independent is being responsible for yourself (one word). If you wanna be able to be an independent thinker and doer, the only thing that is stopping you is your fear of the unknown. And there are a lot of things that I don't know. There's a lot of things you don't know. But only certain ones are we scared of. Don't be scurred!! How do you think you got to where you are? Did you follow a path? Was it the yellow brick road? No. It was you, the main character in your play, making decisions independent of other people. Remember the problem is choice. Be safe, be sane, and I will see you next week. Thanks for listening!! Later!