The Dirty Drawer That You Never Want Opened

Pondering over that one comment that made you waste your entire day thinking about it? This might be for you.

Dear Zedites,

We’ve all grown up with certain inhibitions that make us tick or force us to crawl back into our shells. It sprouts from our childhood. We compile them overtime, leave them unresolved and let them breed and grow in the untapped corners of our brain.

That’s the equivalent of us shoving all our things in that one drawer we never want to open and cheering ourselves on because we falsely believe that our room is clean, when in fact, it’s not.

But it opens up one day (talking about the inhibitions), and unlike a dirty drawer, it does far more mental and physical damage than we could imagine. Well, if your mom opens that dirty drawer you’ve been hiding for so long, expect some physical damage as well.

Those inhibitions are deterrents in our daily lives as we grow up and even the slightest, most benign comment from a stranger can result in an overflow of negative emotion that frankly, we’re better off without.

We then go on to waste our entire day thinking about that one comment that might’ve taken just one second for the other person to come up with. They don’t know what they did and they couldn’t care less but knowingly or unknowingly, we feed on that negative emotion for a very long time. And God forbid, someone does it again.

That’s a lot of precious time wasted.

So how do we resolve this?

At the risk of this becoming an unlicensed therapy session, one of the ways to take this adversity head on, is to acknowledge your feeling. It’s so weird that just by saying, “Yes, I feel like sh*t now but I’m not going to feel like this later,” you start feeling a little better. Not a lot, and it does not always guarantee results but it does no harm to try it out.

However, it’s all temporary until you really get down to the root problem—the problem you faced earlier in your life that made you feel this way. We all know what it is most of the time but we choose to ignore it because ignorance is bliss. Well, not always and not when it comes to your own emotions.

But this issue was All About Mankind. It still is. This is an ode to what you feel when someone opens the drawer you want closed at all times.

Now imagine how many times you’ve accidentally done it to other people. All it took you was one second to spoil someone’s day. That’s some great power. Use it wisely.

Not everyone has the ability to get over inhibitions, nor the means to resolve them and to be honest, it takes nothing to be nice. Many people would argue that it takes patience to be nice and yes, sometimes it does—learn how to be patient while you’re at it.

A wise person once told me, “If you’re easily upset or ticked by someone else’s actions, you’ve given your power to them. The ability to stay calm in times of distress doesn’t come naturally to everyone and if you have that, there might be smarter people in the same room as you, but surely not more powerful.”

Save that power… don’t just hand it over to anyone. It’s more valuable than you could imagine. And if someone has given you that power:

1. Give it back. It has no business being yours.

2. If it’s a no returns situations, DO NOT misuse it.

3. Send them this newsletter. Maybe there’ll be a Eureka moment.

That’s our 3 minutes for today. See ya next time.

Ciao,

Aamer