dragonlady7

via https://ift.tt/2IYmulD

vaspider https://vaspider.tumblr.com/post/631113542017368064/vulpes-aestatis-vaspider-this-year-try :

vulpes-aestatis https://vulpes-aestatis.tumblr.com/post/630445343805440000/vaspider-this-year-try-practicing-the-phrase :

vaspider https://vaspider.tumblr.com/post/630435482224984064/this-year-try-practicing-the-phrase-i-dont-get :

This year, try practicing the phrase “I don’t get it, but I’m happy for you” as well as the sentence “It’s not for me, but it makes them happy, so good for them.“

You will find yourself so much happier if you just acknowledge that other people’s lives aren’t about you. If there is any wisdom I can pass on from my time on this earth to other people, that’s it: other people’s lives aren’t about you, and that’s okay.

Sorry to hijack this post, but this is high-key one of my parenting goals

That’s not a hijack. It’s a good thing to talk about. Teaching your kids this should be a parenting goal.

My family taught me to judge people, constantly. Judge their clothes, their hair, their habits, who they love, how they live, how they worship. My mother and sister think it’s funny to judge the clothing of people they see in public. One of the things that made me stop talking to my father is that he took a picture of a random woman’s tattooed shoulder at a minor league baseball game, without her consent, so he could post it on his Facebook and theorize with his Boomer friends as to what the “meaning” of her ♀️ tattoo meant, including a long side conversation about her “hip to shoulder ratio” and whether or not he thought she was “really female.”

I have to reiterate that what this woman did in order to be treated this way by my father is sit a few rows in front of him at a baseball game with a visible tattoo on the back of her shoulder.

My family taught me to judge people constantly for things that don’t hurt me. I came to the world as a young adult wired for conflict and wired to have a bad time and wired not to get along with people. It took me literally decades and lots of therapy and nearly dying to unwind the judgment for others that my family baked into me. And that judgment made me really miserable, actually! It ruined friendships and screwed up working enviroments and made it hard for me to see the things people do in a neutral or positive light, bc this desire to judge people in order to feel superior to them on the most marginal of points doesn’t easily turn off in your brain. You see everyone as an opponent, always finding flaws rather than points of commonality.

Teach your kids to leave people the fuck alone about the things other people do that don’t hurt your kids. Teach your kids to say “I don’t understand it, but it’s not hurting me, and so I’m glad for them.”

Teach your kids to mind their business. They’ll be much, much happier adults.

and like you don’t have to be a killjoy about it when your friends/coworkers/family are judging people. i’ve disliked shutting down conversations like that in the past because it seems confrontational and you paradoxically can get shoehorned into being The Shrill Harpy if you’re always like “leave them alone!”, but– you can really just adopt a breezy affect and say “well it’s not FOR you then”. I’ve started doing this and it’s genuinely both funny and works to shut down the judginess a lot of the time– you don’t have to be The Politically Correct Harpy all the time. you can just laugh and be like “you don’t like that because you don’t get it because it’s not FOR you to enjoy, let the kids have their fun and go do something else!”

Sample convo: My music auteur coworker hates all rap newer than 1994 and thinks it’s garbage. Whenever he complains about it, I laugh, and say, “then don’t listen to it! Lots of people enjoy it, they don’t need your help! Listen to something you understand instead!” Things you don’t like can be valid and belong on Top 20 charts or whatever but you also don’t have to consume them except insofar as really popular stuff tends to be omnipresent.

But you can just chill. You can be the chill one about this.