Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
My parents always warned me that my vision would start to change after I turned forty. Indeed, as I moved into my forties, I found myself holding books a little farther away, tiny print became totally indecipherable, and the written word has gotten progressively fuzzier. I now have reading glasses stashed all around the house to help me see.
I am not enjoying this part of aging—it’s often frustrating and annoying—but it hasn’t surprised me. I knew it was coming.
But my vision has also changed in other, more significant ways these last few years, and that’s been a change that has taken me by surprise. This latter change has nothing to do with my eyesight, but rather with the way I perceive others and myself.
I’ve always been unusually perceptive. I’ve been told that even as a young child I was very aware of the emotional undercurrents and hidden relational dynamics around me. I didn’t always have the understanding to explain what I sensed, but I was aware of things at deeper levels than what I had ever been told.
As I grew older, it was very easy for this extra level of empathic and intuitive awareness to add fuel to the normal human tendency to judge others. Not only did I have at my disposal additional resources upon which to build my judgment, but the fact that my intuitive perceptions were often accurate increased my assurance that I was right.
And being right is terribly addictive. Every time I would observe someone else and deliver my judgment of them (even if I never spoke it aloud), it gave such a rush of self-righteousness. Because I was sure that I could see the error of someone else’s ways, it “proved” that I must not be prone to that same error. It “proved” that I was better, righter, more righteous.
On top of that, because we humans love judgment and love to see others taken down a notch (or two or three), using these judgments as fuel to criticize, mock, or snark at those I had judged with my friends often seemed to gain their admiration, at least for the moment. I could make them laugh or join me in my self-righteousness, letting them in on feeling the same rush.
It was a highly prized skill. Oh, I knew better, of course. I knew it wasn’t my place to judge others. I knew how much I hated it when I was judged. But I always rationalized it away. You see, I was just telling it like it is since I can see so clearly what is happening. Or I am just warning people about their own unconscious “stuff” or about others’ “stuff” before they get hurt. Or I’m just using my discernment to help me better navigate the world.
Most importantly, if I am just telling the truth about the situation, then it’s my duty, right? Truth is always good.
What I didn’t see for a very long time was that I was not only slowly poisoning my relationships with others, I was poisoning my relationship with myself. With each rush of self-righteousness as I judged another, I was injecting distrust into my relationships. They knew that I would eventually judge them with the same harshness that I turned on others, no matter how sympathetic I was to them at the time.
This same harsh judgment was also what I turned on myself all day, all the time. At the very same time that I was so certain that I knew how other people should be living their lives (if only they would just listen to me!), I was completely unable to make decisions about my own life.
I was judging myself so harshly all the time that I did not trust my own perceptions about who I was or what I should do in any situation. Even the smallest of decisions paralyzed me, so I’d spend lots of time checking with all of my friends to get their opinions about what I should do before I chose. I had no idea how to figure out what I really wanted or needed.
As I’ve gone through this pit the last few years as my life has been ripped apart in every way possible, my vision changed. The relationships that I had thought would sustain me through hard times crumbled into dust from the poison that I had injected into them for so long. I had done too much damage for them to be able to hold up under the strain. Instead, I found the very judgment I had gloried in for so long now being reflected back at me from all sides.
I finally realized that even when their judgments were “right” in the sense of accurately capturing my faults, they were still inaccurate if they did not also see me with enough compassion to realize that my bad behavior came out of places of pain and fear. They were only seeing part of the story, only seeing the worst of me. I slowly learned to begin judging myself with a mix of calling myself on my bad behavior while simultaneously offering myself the grace of acknowledging the pain and fear that was driving it.
That did not mean letting myself off the hook for my bad behavior, but I was better able to change my bad behavior when the naming of that behavior was mixed with the kindness of acknowledging what drove it. It gave me the space to be more than my bad behavior. It allowed me the grace of seeing my wounds and dealing with the pain and the fear directly instead of just beating myself up for my faults. And, ultimately, that grace-filled approach was more successful at creating positive change than all of the years of harsh judgment that came before.
At the same time, learning to treat myself with a little grace has also helped me learn to trust myself. I make even big decisions now completely on my own. I don’t need others to validate my choices or my experiences. I am able to discern my own wants and needs.
As I’ve learned all of this about the way I treat myself, I can’t help but apply the same approach to the way I see others. I still find it tempting to judge others way too quickly, but that rush of self-righteousness is now a warning sign that I’m entering poisonous territory, and it no longer feels so good. I’ve learned that if I can’t see the other person with a compassionate eye that allows for grace for the hurts and fears that may be driving their bad behavior, then my view is incomplete and therefore inaccurate.
If I’ve lost sight of the fact that they are so much more than their bad behavior, I’m not seeing them clearly. If I can’t see them with compassion and with a recognition of myself in them at their worst, I’m as good as blind no matter how perceptive I seem to be.
It’s still sometimes important to call out bad behavior, especially if it is doing damage, but I do so with greater fear and trembling now because I recognize more clearly my own distorted view and I acknowledge that bad behavior always stems from pain and fear, so I’m treading on wounds with every step. I am no longer able to gloat about how “right” I am because I am grieving the woundedness of the other even as I name the bad behavior.
I am no longer able to see the other as other to be judged and mocked and “fixed” because all I see is the commonality of the pain and fear that infects us all and makes us all act in ways we wouldn’t otherwise.
This vision change has profoundly changed my relationship with myself and with others, and it’s been one of the best things that’s happened to me (although the learning process was painfully hard!). Every time I find myself reaching for my reading glasses with frustration at my diminishing ability to see clearly, it reminds me of this vision change too and my frustration turns to gratitude. This gift of greater clarity in my vision of the world is worth so much more than the minor frustration of blurry words.
How has your vision of yourself or of your world changed over the years? In what ways do you see more clearly or less clearly than you used to?
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