People aren’t crazy, they’re wounded.  People aren’t stupid, they’re scared.  People aren’t jerks, they’re exhausted by not living the life they want to live.  People aren’t assholes, they’re protecting themselves.  I always found myself thinking the same negative, hurtful thoughts every day while driving home.  A little context: I have a long commute and I get annoyed with bad driving.  Ok, fine, I get incredible rage at bad driving.  That is literally my biggest pet peeve in the world.  You’re operating a 4,000 pound vehicle, fucking act like you know that. Anyway.  It was to the point where I literally felt like I needed a camera for protection because people were so aggressive with my smaller car.  While driving home, I realized that I needed to change the narrative.  I don’t want people thinking bad about me, we all make mistakes, but the truth is there is so much more to what we are feeling.  We all want to get where we need to be, we are all so tired, and we are all in this rat race.  I felt myself spinning and thought I was crazy, and I realized, I have these wounds in my brain because of old programming.  I call myself crazy all the time—and I know it’s not really crazy: it’s because I’m scarred, and if I act this way because I’m scared, then chances are other people are too. 

I realized today that I need to slow down because I too quickly jump to the bad feelings or judgements about others even if I don’t mean to.  So much more than I thought I did.  I’m making mistakes I normally would never make, I’m feeling anxiety, I have old fears popping up.  My brain is in overtime to a degree I’ve never experienced before.  Repetitive thoughts, fears, anxiety, exhaustion, analysis paralysis.  My brain is circling and cycling through the same thoughts because I haven’t moved to change them.  I need to slow down. The constant stimulation and speed of life has made it hard for anyone to get through the day in a normal pace.  We are constantly divided and our brains are not meant to deal with so may forms of stimulation at once.  We do best with one train of focus but somehow we have idolatrized this idea of the multi-tasker.  I don’t want to say that we will never have to do multiple things or that we can’t accomplish multiple things, but we certainly do our best at those things when we focus on one thing at a time.  With billions of us essentially forced to live in ADD every day, it’s no wonder we behave erratically.  Don’t even get me started on the concept of keeping us sick and distracted to have another element of control over us. 

Regardless, the point is we all need to give each other a little more space and grace. We all need to do the same for ourselves and understand that we are all on this journey together.  We all want the same thing, we all want to thrive in this world and no one truly enjoys being told what to do for a living.  We are looking for freedom we inherently have but aren’t allowed to express (or we think we aren’t allowed to express it) because in order to live and thrive int his world, we have set rules that promote some behaviors over others.  If we give each other time to understand that everyone is experiencing the same feeling, the feeling of wanting to come awake and live their lives how they want to, then I think we’d be more tolerant of each other.  We need to remember that if we feel stressed and overwhelmed, other people do to and, unfortunately, not everyone responds to stress and overwhelm the same way.  Some people react angrily, others get sad, others shut down, others lash out.  So instead of jumping to the conclusion that someone is crazy or stupid or doing something intentionally, give them the benefit of the doubt.  The same benefit we’d want for ourselves and we start seeing the world in a different way.