10 years ago I snapped my Achilles tendon and had to have surgery to repair it. After surgery I couldn’t walk at all, I didn’t even have crutches. The day after surgery I was all alone and I had to drag myself on the floor to get to the bathroom, get food, or get my medications.
I felt completely alone, abandoned, and rejected by my friends, family, church, and everyone. I called my friend in Portland in tears because I was feeling depressed and alone.
Just a couple of years ago I was telling this story, and my friend Crystal was there, and she said, “Wait a minute, I brought you a meal!”
As I have reevaluated that experience I realized that people DID reach out, but I rewrote history to match my feelings. Now I remember Crystal’s meal, and that my pastor called me, and that my Life group leader asked if I needed meals, and I said “no”. I felt so abandoned that I forgot about any of the positives of that time. I looked at the experience through a lens of pain and it blinded me to anything that contradicted my feelings. I took note of the negatives but not the positives.
I learned several things from Crystal’s awareness opportunity.
Sometimes I’m hurt, but nobody hurt me. I want someone to be responsible for the pain, but there doesn’t need to be a guilty party every time I feel hurt. I felt abandoned, but that doesn’t mean that anyone really abandoned me. It was just my own feelings.
Sometimes my hurt feelings are caused by my own insecurities. I might feel like I’m not worth people’s time, so when people don’t reach out, I hear them saying “You don’t matter,” when they never said that or communicated that in any way. It is my own voice that I am wrestling with. Or you could say Satan’s voice.
When I expect people to reject me, they do. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. I do things that set them up. I treat them like they will, and then they do. I hardly told anyone about the surgery. I didn’t ask anyone for help; I expected them to be mind-readers. And I expected that no one would reach out. And because I expected to see rejection, that’s exactly what I got.
Expectations set me up to be disappointed. I decide what people should do, and make a rule that that’s what good people do, and then when they don’t, I convict them. I call it rejection. And I feel rejection. Since then I have learned the skill of turning every expectation into a desire. A desire is something that I would like, but I don’t have to have. I may ask for something but I don’t treat it like a rule. So if someone doesn’t meet a desire, I’m OK with that, and not hurt by it. Expectations just set me up to be angry or hurt when I am disappointed.
I realized that I never asked anyone for any help. My huge revelation was that if I had asked anyone for help, I would have had a houseful of help. My phone would have been ringing off the hook, I would have had more food in my refrigerator than it could hold, and I would have had 10 personal assistants. I know that’s the truth, but I never thought about it that way, because I was viewing the situation through a lens of pain and “victim”, and I didn’t want to see a contradictory story. I felt rejection by people who weren’t even given the chance to reach out.
Thank you for the meal Crystal! It really brought healing to my life!
