…I believe it is the most difficult job if you want to do it accurately. Naturally there’s always battle on how you view your self vs how others viewed you. Being a painfully practical and insensitive person (that’s how I viewed my self, at least) I took a course where we suppose to develop an intuition in guessing people character. The final test was guessing the other participants character and confirm it with them whether they think our guess is close to how they think they are. You’ll be amazed at the difference on what you think about a person and how that particular person viewed them selves. It is quite expected though as we’ve met for only few days but that’s the course is all about, how you made a snapshot on one character and came close to the real one. In the recruitment world, you don’t have time to socialize with the candidate, mind you!

Anyway, the reason why I suddenly recall this course was a colleague and also a dear friend of mine (read: a person who spend her time with me for at least 40 hours a week - working hours permitted by the government in a week) said to me today, “It must feel good to be you, you are so plain, you never angry, you never panic, you never worry…just plain, plain, plain and plain!” I laughed my head off, secretely amused on how could she think I am plain. The truth is, of course I am not! I am a human being after all. Of course there were times when I really angry, I was so angry I threw my fist to the window and crushed it - my hand was bleeding so badly I had to be taken to the hospital to get it stitched (yup, that’s me, surprise?), there was time when I was panic when I suddenly found my self unable to breath and must grasp something to stay standing and there were many times when I worried, I worried so sickly my stomach churned and I felt as if my heart stop beating. But the truth is, I seldom feel that way. It will take a lot of things to bring me up to that level and I guess that’s why I was viewed as a plain person. Always happy and smiling, never carried grudge and seemed to have thousand of excuses to forgive someone. But am I really? (or in your case, are you?) Of course I am not. But I think what differentiate me with that dear friend of mine is I am a strong believer that you can control how you feel towards something. I fully believed that you hold full control of your own emotions. And believe me, when you have Lupus, you won’t have time to steam up negative emotions as stress is one of the thing that triggered inflamatation most. I learned the secret of it when I was 17. I learned it hard and quick.

I’ve learned that once you let something upset you, your lungs close down. First you’d feel difficult to breath. Second, your legs and arms are numbed. And third, your face turn blue and somebody will need to put oxygen mask on you. Not nice, eh?

I had 2 options, let my feelings get the better of me or train my self to choose how I felt towards something. For the sake of my own health, I chosed the later. And it works!

The implementation is close to this: a jerk said something awful about you. Take a deep breath, look him (or her) in the eye and vowed silently that you won’t let it ruin your day. It is he (or she) who has problem so hear what he (or she) said, scan for some self assesment (just in case there are some truth in it - you must not be THAT thick either and have perfect illusion about your self) and if it is not, put it in your delete folder. You can’t control somebody not to be a jerk but you can control your response to it. By doing that you are not only saved your self from having a bad day but also teach that jerk a lesson that you can’t be provoked to go down to his (or her) level. Easy, right?

The result is astonishing. Once I accepted the fact that there are many unpleasant things would happen to me and stop questioning why it should happen to me (and not to somebody else), life seemed a bit lighter in that respect. My Lupus even went into remission for years when I came to acceptance that I may die any minute because of it just like everybody else who is breathing, am I not correct?. So, why should we overly worried about something that will happen anyway? Why should we question somebody else’s action (as a matter of fact I still do sometimes, however, out of curiosity of the motivation rather than feeling hurt) if we can ‘taylor’ our response?

Now back to my friend and the way she judged me, I am sure if she spend her time with me 24/7 365 days a year she would see that other side of me. It is impossible to be happy all the time but when you optimise the ability of creating your own happiness, you’ll be surprise how fun this life actually is.

One of the fun I have been having consist of trying to understand other’s character by listening to what they said and see things that they do, comprehend the reason of their action, see the facts, check it with what they said, contemplating whether the character in the surface match the fact finding and if not what is the real motives beneath it then hopefully I will be able to understand their values as motivation driven by values and values is what you really are.

Am I being painfully analytical again? I guess I need a cup of warm milk to put my mind to rest…