“Self-control is strength.  Calmness is mastery.  You have to get to a point where your mood doesn’t shift based on the insignificant actions of someone else.  Don’t allow others to control the direction of your life.  Don’t allow your emotions to overpower your intelligence,” Daniel Chidiac.  This can feel like an insurmountable task at times because we are emotional creatures—we were not born Vulcans.  Nor do I suggest that living solely in logic is the way to go because we would entirely miss out on the real magic that exists in this world.  There is a middle ground where we allow what we feel but we don’t allow it to control what we DO.  Speaking as someone who lived her days closer to a ping pong ball, bouncing between being a savior to whomever seemed to need it and then angry and resentful that no one saw ME, being the chameleon but never standing my ground, my entire life was malleable to the influence of what happened around me.  I approached each day as if I were preparing for battle because I never knew what I would face.  I assumed everyone lived like that—like we were all subject to how people were feeling that day.  Our thoughts can be subject to what others feel but our choices, our path, our actions are entirely our own.  Self-control means recognizing that.  It means recognizing when people are making emotional decisions and understanding our response doesn’t need to come from that.  Someone’s dark cloud doesn’t need to become my own—and used to dive right under that rain with everyone, shielding them, guiding them out whether they asked or not.  Frankly it was obnoxious and it kept me from dealing with my own crap.

That latter point is something we need to examine a bit further: dealing with our crap.  I was raised to keep my thoughts, feelings, needs on the back burner.  I’m not talking about every day needs because the truth is I lacked for nothing as far as food/shelter/water/clothing etc.  What I lacked was a sense of self because I was taught that other people would always take priority.  I was taught my creative endeavors weren’t worth the time and that it took permission and effort on the part of others for me to have a creative outlet.  I was taught to NOT listen to instinct, rather do as I was told and always do what someone else needed/wanted first.  For a long time I never questioned any of it.  I assumed everyone lived that way, with the same priority of putting others first.  When I started to wake up and the things calling to me spoke louder and louder, and I saw that more and more people simply did what they wanted, I began to question things.  I began to feel resentment that I didn’t have the same attitude or fortitude to go for what I wanted.  Ever adaptable, I could be there at the drop of a hat for anything—but people failed to take me seriously and were rarely there for me.  Being a resource for others led them to assume I was always in control but I was the furthest thing from it: I was taking on everything everyone else felt and doing the work for them and it left me raw and battered and questioning my own existence.  I had no foundation about who I was or wanted to be because those things didn’t matter.  And I got angry and controlling and resentful—so I was labeled as angry but people had no shame in still coming to me when they needed something.

It wasn’t until I realized what I was doing to myself that I understood people were only responding to what they saw in me.  They saw an uncertain, scared, little girl.  The fact that I could help people and they needed me for some of their tightest jams didn’t translate to them seeing me as an independent, intelligent, capable woman.  They saw me as a necessary evil, someone they tolerated when they were in those difficult places.  That hurt and I let that feeling take over for a long time—I fully let it run my life.  My anger and resentment fully visible but so was my desperation to make people see me a certain way.  It completely made me irrational because I spent more time trying to drive people’s view of me rather than focusing on living my life.  I thought strength was pulling people out of jams, but strength is knowing how to leverage our own talents, strength is standing on our own two feet, strength is knowing when we need help, strength is walking away from that which hurts us, strength is being authentic and sticking to our values/our identity when people want us to be their version of who they think we are.  Being hyper aware of other people’s emotions also made me super sensitive to the fact that people weren’t aware of mine.  It drove me nuts.  And then I realized that I was still giving them power over me.  Expecting them to treat me a certain way or see me a certain way was still giving them the power because I was upset over their (in)action.  I hated being controlled that way—by giving them control.  I knew I needed to take that back, to pick that up for the first time.  To truly move forward, we need to have that adaptability and awareness of who we are and the confidence to not be rattled by someone else’s fleeting feelings—or our own. Master our thoughts and emotions and the rest comes together.