As I was sitting at Paris Baguette earlier this evening, just needing a bit of time to wind down after a rather emotionally heavy day, I could not help but feel this urge to express what I’m really feeling about my current setup/circumstances. For a split moment, I considered the old, but familiar “fake gratitude” act that I used to perform so much of. Here’s the thing, some of those times, the gratitude and appreciation I was expressing were real. But there were also times when the gratitude & appreciation was just a performance for the online audience. I would say stuff like, “I know I don’t have much right now. But what little I do have, I am really grateful for it. And I’m determined to make the best of it until something better comes along.”
That’s the thing. It sounds really nice. Maybe even admirable. But that is only when I really meant it. But there would be those times when I saw what I had and all I really felt was this genuine frustration with the hardware limitations.
See, being an industry pioneer, and a “master artisan/builder”, I do have certain hardware specs requirements. That’s the thing you have to understand, most people, including myself, have been shrinking and minimizing our vision & mission so that it would fit to the size of where we are. And when it comes to being who we are, and what we are capable of achieving, the last thing we want to do is to shrink who we are and what we are capable of accomplishing to the size of our means.
Instead, I want to start enlarging my means so that it will measure up to the size of my vision, missions, who we are and what we can accomplish. So yes, in the face of a limited hardware setup, it can be frustrating trying to work with my hands tied behind my back (in a manner of speaking). And yes, I needed to voice my frustration about my circumstances because I know what will happen if I tried to suppress it, or brush it off (like I’ve used to do for 20+ years). It is what I called “mental and emotional debt”.
The more we try to suppress our thoughts and feelings, or pretend that it isn’t there so we can avoid dealing with them; that is when our thoughts and feelings get added to the pile. And yeah, I have a whole mountain of it to deal with (which will likely take years). The last thing I needed is to brush this feeling of frustration off and add it to the pile.
By allowing myself to voice it out, it no longer remains in my system, and honestly, I know it could potentially help me to sleep better tonight. The problem with bottling up our thoughts and feelings is that we never know when they might be triggered, or when they will resurface. At 2 am this morning, I couldn’t sleep because I could feel something sitting on my chest. Turns out, it was all the feelings of being ignored, rejected, and being treated as invisible by the local design industry for many years. It has reached critical mass and I just had to finally let it out (like releasing the pressure valve).
These accumulated issues can come up when we least expect it. So hear me when I say this: Don’t brush those feelings and thoughts away. As uncomfortable as dealing with them might be, trust me, it is much easier to deal with them in the moment than have them come up in the middle of the night.
So, yes, as of today, we are officially done with performing the whole “fake gratitude” act.
Leave a Reply