Being Erica Season 4: Being Functional (early access)
The moral case for becoming functional in the world and working with other people.
Most of us wish we could fit in better with society.
We don't like the idea of being on the outside, yet some part of us can't help but feel like we're cut off from others. As if somehow even though so many people do the same things we do and have many of the same experiences, our problems are special. They can't help us along the way towards making ourselves better. Because we're the unique ones and everyone else is just ordinary and has no concept of you and what you feel. Of course, part of us feels this way because we want to cut ourselves off from others. To avoid dealing with what we don't want to see, either in other people or in ourselves. It's easier to believe that we're just too complicated for anyone to help us. But is that in fact actually true? How would we even know that if we wanted to figure it out?
One of the best ways to figure out how to fix yourself is by talking to someone else. By relying on another person that you can tell everything to. In an ideal world, this is just someone who you happen to share a lot with. Yet more often than not, it's a professional, a therapist. Someone who is paid to listen to your problems and help you sort them out in a real sense. If you can get a good one, it has enormous benefits. However, what happens when someone else is relying on you? When you are the therapist who is listening to other people's problems? From the perspective of a patient, it seems like your therapist is a calm and collected person. Of course being people, they can have their own problems. Especially if what you're dealing with is something that they haven't figured out themselves.
Previously in this space, we've explored the idea of living in the past and how your history informs the life you're trying to have. Then we looked at the way in which it's a struggle to focus on the present. More recently we looked at how to work together with other people to know you're better off. But ultimately what that can lead to is wanting to help others. To make people confront their own problems and become the kind of people that you want to be around. Actually doing that is much harder than it seems though. Because in doing so, you are forced to confront what it is about yourself that doesn't quite measure up. Or how you compare yourself to others and make things worse. So how do we do that exactly?
“And that's the distinction is it? That when Josh does it it's on purpose but when you do it, it's by accident right? You place Josh down here, and you place yourself up here... and you say, that... is not me. I could never be like that. That person is... other, is undeserving, a monster. It's an old story. It's how wars begin, it's how people turn on each other, and you know it starts so simply too. I am not you, I am nothing like you... and it is each time, a lie. Because underneath all the layers of fear and protection we are at our core, the same. We have the same needs and we carry with us the same capacity for good and evil. You are every patient you will ever have, and every person you will ever meet. And until you acknowledge that you have the capacity not just for kindness and compassion, but also for heartlessness and cruelty. Until you acknowledge that you will never be able to start, from here. An equal footing.”
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