Of being right

I’ve broached the topic of being right in People banging on about your past mistakes. But there’s more to it. I told a tale about a person who needs to be right. But the truth is, that all of us have it ingrained. The need to be right makes us blind to the hurt we cause in others by disregarding their truths. The longer I live, the more it appears to me that I have to detach myself from what I believe to be true. Why? I don’t believe in one truth. I believe that the life experience that you collect influences the way you see things massively. So how could there be an absolute truth or how could there only be one truth?

Also, seeing how my father isolated himself more and more over the years, puts me really off of being right. He is not a happy old man. He doesn’t even have good things to say about the people who are close to him. Even when people try to be generous or try to share their joy, he picks out the negative in it or it simply isn’t generous enough. Our communication was never very good. I’ve never felt like I could engage in a reasonable debate with him. The conversations I witnessed had the same pattern mostly. Repeating his own view and trying to bulldoze the other person. The feeling, that what I thought or had experienced, never mattered anyways, silenced me for most of the time. I stopped engaging in any meaningful conversations. When I made decisions, I never consulted him. In the past, he had tried to undermine me. When I took the hijab off, he stopped talking to me for half a year. The only reason we did talk again, was because I approached him (after my mother told me that I should approach him). I knew, that I could not rely on my father, so I stopped relying on him.

I honestly didn’t know how to break this cycle. I longed for him to be an actual part of my life, but I couldn’t see how this was going to happen. I longed for both of my parents and for my brothers to be present, but it felt like they didn’t want to look at me properly. It seemed like they knew I was different but were trying to ignore it as long as it was possible. They weren’t quiet about what they thought was right, and I didn’t know how to get through to them, that I didn’t agree. Not just stating my disagreement, but actually get them to acknowledge that things could be seen and done differently.

I lived two separate lives, and it was my way of keeping myself going. Even though this conflict was there, the geographical distance, that I had created, allowed me to explore who I was out of their sight and judgement. I explored love, friendship, relationships and life. I partied, I drank, I had sex and I bonded with people outside of the circle, that initially I got thrown in. I travelled and I came to the conclusion, that something was missing still. So, I left again. Whatever I did, I believed I was doing myself. I thought, I was finding my own truth. And now I’d like to detach from my truth. I want to be able to experience the world through different channels. Being married requires you to accept someone else’s perception. Being a mother asks for the same. When we deal with people, we tend to make assumptions. They can be based on our experience or can be based on how we experience someone. But they are assumptions, and there is no way of getting them right all the time. When we start questioning our thinking, we allow ourselves to be more objective. We’re more alert to other ways of thinking, and this might help us to be happier. If we accept that our thinking is wrong a lot of times, we stop asking why another person doesn’t see it the way we do. We then start to wonder, where they’re coming from. The energy that we used to put into despair, is channelled into a more constructive approach.

Human beings tend to look for meaning everywhere. That’s why we create stories, and it is why religion is needed and being held on to. Just because we need meaning to process events, doesn’t mean meaning exists within events. We’ve all heard how we’re responsible for our own happiness. What does it mean? Does happiness stem from how we respond to life and how we process the world? I would say so. I used to beat myself up about a million things, always wanting to be right and in control. When I look at my daughter and how she experiences things, takes them in and tries to manipulate them, it teaches me that we’ve learned expectations. We’ve learned to see things the way we see them. We can unlearn seeing them like that as well. Especially if they block a deeper dive into experience, it might be necessary to unlearn truths, we thought we’d never let go of. And that’s the thing about being right. If we hang on to it, we shut the door to something else. And that something else is not the other side of the coin, it’s millions of different coins from all around the world.