Everyone & Everything Else
“In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.” — Anne Frank
I’ve dated a few people over the years and each one has taught me something valuable, regardless of if we ended on good terms or not. Losing people from your life can sometimes be a blessing in disguise, as it teaches us what we don’t want in a lover, a relationship, or in life. Often after the initial feelings of a breakup have subsided, you can look back with clarity and realize that perhaps they weren’t meant to be the whole book, but instead just a chapter that you have to go through. Sometimes, people are merely supposed to come into your life to teach you not only things about love, relationships, and life, but about yourself, too.
The truth is, most of us keep giving people who hurt us so many chances because we hope and pray that maybe this time it’ll be different. We hold onto faith that maybe this time the scenario would end up good and happy. So, we don’t mind if we become the one who keeps waiting, wishing, praying, giving, and loving everyone and everything around us, we give everything wholeheartedly that we almost forgot our worth as a person, because we just don’t know how to do anything else.
Love yourself first before you can love someone else
I hate when people say, love yourself first before you can love someone else, and even if to some extent that phrase is true, on the contrary, it isn’t that you don’t love who you are but I think it’s possible to love yourself through loving everyone and everything else if that makes sense. Sometimes the love you give to them is like a reflection of how much you love yourself too. I do it myself, and I’ve been doing it my whole life.
I have a theory that you can treat yourself as best as you can, but that doesn’t mean you love yourself. For instance, I love shopping, so every time I feel stressed out or achieved something I’m proud of, I always buy things for myself whether it’s new clothes, shoes, bags, or anything. Yes, it makes me happy for a while but that happiness doesn’t linger on for too long. But it’s different when I buy things as a gift to someone. The happiness that I get from seeing the smile on their face is literally lasted for so long. — And I guess that’s it, you cannot be your own source of joy, at least not all the time.
Love and happiness can truly be felt when it is shared.
Another example is, when we think about the phrase love yourself, we define it as doing everything that we want. So, what if someone going to the club every night, getting drunk, and hooking up with strangers, but later on a few years later they get sick because of how much alcohol they used to drink or they get some kind of genital disease, would that still be they love themselves?
I think “love yourself” and “self-love” are overrated. We forgot the fact that when we love we must listen to both our minds and our hearts so we can love ourselves right.
Why loving people is so easy and why loving them will make you love yourself too?
Making people happy is just one of the things that makes me utterly happy. I find that making people happy and believing that people are actually good at heart brings me hope and a more positive outlook on life. Like Anne Frank said in her 283 pages diary. Even though she and her family went through so much pain and eventually lost their lives, she still believed that there is good in people and that nobody is born evil. Reading her life and that thought seems so heartbreaking and ironic, “how could she still believe that people are good when all around her was pure evil?”
The answer is that for truly good people, it is easier to see the good in others than to see the bad in them.
In a world full of pain and trauma, we are born with a defense mechanism as our survival tool to guard or shield us from attack. Experiencing pain or trauma will inevitably cause great suffering and activate that defense mechanism that changed us in fundamental ways.
I read a CNN article titled “People are inherently good, nonviolent” by David G. Allan. He quoted Susanne Babbel, a psychotherapist specializing in trauma recovery. She said, “every time we experience or hear about a traumatic event, we go into stress mode. We might go numb or have an overactive fear response to the perceived threat. Our physiology is triggered to release stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.” Although we might not realize it, but it has real mental and physical short to long-term impacts on us.
This understanding of human nature is what makes me believe that no human is born evil. We just have different defense responses to protect ourselves from pain. Our innate sense of good over bad is where we all start. Despite how we’re raised and what we’ve gone through, we are all still, fundamentally, good at heart.
Some people are evil, though, right?
Putting aside religious arguments, when we brand people with that label, we lose the opportunity to address the causes of their actions.
Hate and desperation, in particular, have seeds in abuse, aggression, hopelessness, and isolation. Under certain circumstances, we are all capable of doing things to others that cause them pain that sometimes it’s to simply protect ourselves. Yes, some of these acts go beyond our capacity to immediately understand them, but that doesn’t mean we can’t.
You see what your mind wants you to see. When you focused on others’ bad behavior and disregard their good deeds, you will only see them as bad.
Put it this way, when you truly love someone you will adore everything about them, even their smelly armpit or the loud sound of their snore would not annoy you. But, when you already don’t like someone, all you see is the bad in them, you will be annoyed at everything they say or do no matter how kind they are to you, your mind will automatically search for their flaws or mistakes.
Seeing the good in people and the world is actually benefitting us. When we see the good in people and believe that they’re actually good people we will feel more at ease. We will also connect better with them.
Although we live in a world where good things are taken away from us far too soon or bad things could happen to us anytime, I guess seeing the good in everyone and everything would make our lives feel lighter. Because as humans, experiencing kindness and love whether it’s giving or receiving stimulates euphoria.
“There’s a difference between what we need to have and what we need to be. Head is what need to have, Heart is what we need to be.”
“If the head disappears from earth, there’ll be no progress whatsoever. But if the heart disappears from earth, there’ll be no human whatsoever.”
— Abhijit Naskar
Something overlooked is the value of good people.
I always ask myself, “am I actually a good person?” and I could never answer that question. I categorize people into two groups. First, the people who are somewhat good (which is average) and the people who are actually and completely good. Simply put, the people who are somewhat good are the people who expect something in return for their goodness. They see being good and nice as transactional. Meanwhile, the people who are actually and completely good are the people who are good because they want to and gain nothing from it. These are those people who write thank-you notes, send long encouraging paragraphs, buy you gifts with no occasion, and the sort of people who cook extra food to share without thinking, the people who say sorry a lot, and basically they would do nice or helpful things without being asked.
I have a best friend since college who chose to take care of her family especially her little sister after her parents’ death instead of pursuing her master’s degree in Korea. She doesn’t go out much with her friends and stopped traveling which she really loves. She literally put her life on hold for her family. She stopped putting herself first for almost 2 years. And the fact that she never complains and does it sincerely because she wanted to is what makes her an actual good person.
One morning when I was in my senior year of high school, I missed my school tour bus on our campus trip to Bandung. I was so panicked that I eventually stood on the sideway, raised my thumb, and hitchhiked a truck whose driver was really friendly and kind enough to drive me to catch up my tour bus. We’ve been on the road for almost 2 hours and talked many things about traffic, his family, his job, etc. After finally meeting my friends & the tour bus on the toll road, the driver dropped me off, and said “hati-hati di jalan nak cantik, semangat ya sekolahnya!” meaning “safe trip, kid, go get your education!”
Everyone thought that I was insane for hitchhiking a truck. They said, I could’ve been raped, sold, killed, etc. And then they said, “truck drivers are dangerous.” I was in awe of these really cruel labels about someone’s job. How could someone’s job define who they are as a person? That just doesn’t make sense.
—I later learned that goodness exists outside of that matrix. We spend so much of our lives quantifying ourselves and each other through superficial criteria that it’s important to recognize something beyond and past that which gives us and the world more value.
The problem, though, is the root of all that good people were judged by what they give you, and appreciation is so expensive because we’re constructed to the idea that kindness is transactional. It’s a superficial understanding and it leaves you and your possibility of seeing the good in people out of the equation.
“Inside of me, there are two dogs. One is mean and evil and the other is good, and they fight each other all the time. When asked which one wins, I answer, the one I feed the most.” — Sitting Bull
With love,
R
