Here is why you shouldn't force anything

Anything forced ain't pretty. It feels like a duty

I’ve come across this from so many movies, novels I have read, conversations, songs. I have come across it with myself. I hate to be in anything forced because my heart is not fully into it. If it is not into it, it won't care. It won’t do its best. It will just do as told and pray it ends soon.

That’s pretty much how I have been living my life. I just didn’t realize it until today. It is one of the epiphanies in this game of life that I have come across in the space of a week.

Am usually angry when things do not go my way. I just want what I want sometimes. You know that saying, ‘the heart wants what it wants’. If the food ain’t cooked right, I dread eating it and complain about it or talk about how bad it is as if the person who made it is bad. Want to meet up with a person, I get all angry when they say they are busy and I can’t see them at the moment, but maybe later. To me, I hear, no, I don’t want to meet up with you. I hear rejection.

I want a ball, and I don’t find it were I thought I would find it, I get so frustrated at the ball that doesn’t exist for not being there. I just get so caught up in this game of anger of expectations not communicated about. Situations where am forcing people to do what I want them to do for me and usually, for my gain. Always thinking in the, 'me' kind of way. Hey, it’s about me not you. 

It’s funny how all these years, it registered to me as something I deserve. I deserve to be given what I want, when I want it and how I want it. No excuses. Just there. It never occured to me to think about it in the win-win kind of sense despite having had come across it, actually learnt it in class. Sure, I know it is because I was living on autopilot, but I just cannot stand to think about the possibility of other people just like me, somehow somewhere living like that.

 I feel really sad and sorry about it. About them doing damage that they are so oblivious about. They have no idea about the fact that what they are doing is wrong. To them, it is the way of life. Now I know it is conditioned behaviour and thinking amassed overtime to avoid pain and loss of control and the unknown. To feel in control because it felt humiliating not to be somewhere, long in the past.

Forcing things doesn’t make anything better. Maybe for the forcer at the moment. It destroys relationships because it is like one is a bully and no one wants to be bullied. No one wants to be a slave or a puppet. We all love freedom. 

It just feels really sad for me to realise this cold hard truth today. That I have been a very forceful kinda person, in love with control to avoid uncertainty that brings paralysing fear.

 

It took my baby brother to scream at me to change a channel from what I was watching to what he wanted for me to realise it. He cried and screamed and all the while, I felt anger-passively, for his action. Why can’t he just let me be, join me rather. Why can’t he just ask nicely that he wants something else. But no. He demands as if I have done him wrong and all the while I feel bad. I feel like just hitting the high note of the volume just so I don’t hear him. And all over a sudden, am wishing I wasn’t there. Am wishing lights go off or to be in some place quiet. 

I feel like I have been a big baby for a long, long time. And I now get the sense of how the people close to me have felt about something I was blind to. The effect of my own behaviour silenced me today. For once, I didn’t want to speak. I was just so lost in thought and with my eyes heavy with salty water. I could break down. Nobody wants to be in a forced situation. Go for win-win. Go for water-flow. Go for freedom. You will agree with me, you hate forced conversations, work, anything.

It is wise to direct your anger towards the problem, not the people. To focus your energies to answers not excuses. 

Another thing I have been so good at for the past years. Clearly stated in the above is a phrase that caught me off-guard and made me stop to think about my thoughts for once. It made me feel that I need to learn to think better. To stop blaming people or situation for the problems I have.