Realizing that I am insane, that I’m confused about reality, has made it easier to question my beliefs and assumptions—if I’m insane how right can I be about anything? One result is that I’ve realized how deluded I’ve been about myself. I have been blind to certain aspects of my personality my entire life!
In We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity I talk about how I thought for a long time that I wasn’t a competitive person and how startling it was when I realized that self-assessment is wrong. I am in fact a very competitive person. As long as I was convinced that my subjective belief “I am not competitive” was an objective fact, I was completely kidding myself. Now that I have exposed this belief as a lie, I may still be competitive but at least I am not so deluded about who I am.
Recently I have faced another area where I was mistaken about myself: patience. If you had asked me a few months ago if I was a patient person, I would have answered, “yes, I have a lot of patience.” One of my hobbies is weaving, and when people learn how many hours it takes just to set the loom up before weaving even starts, they can’t imagine having the patience to do that.
I hate to lose things because I feel that searching for a lost item is a frustrating waste of time and energy. As a consequence I am very organized and can almost always put my hands on anything in a very short time, no matter how long it’s been since that thing has been used.
I think of time and energy as finite resources that are extremely valuable, and I think I am right to conserve them, not squander them. So I feel justified in criticizing people who are sloppy and careless with their time and energy, particularly when their inefficiency impacts my life! If I’m impatient with their inefficiency, that’s not my problem, it’s their’s.
Recently I began a daily routine of mentally going back over my day, assessing my behavior towards the people I had interacted with that day (and this also included time on the phone with customer service representatives and telemarketers!). Did I feel impatience or anger? Was I rude? Was I even just a little grumpy? Was I withdrawn and apathetic?
It quickly became clear that I had a real problem with waiting. When I found myself in a long line at the grocery store or post office, or if a checkout person was slow, impatience would wash over me and I would start fuming. (I lived in a small town for many years and one of the things I loved best was I almost never had to wait anywhere—bank, post office, grocery store, etc.)
My rationalization for my anger was that waiting was inefficient, a total waste of time. I would end up being rude and extremely short with the poor clerk who ended up waiting on me.
As I thought about it, I realized that what I was saying was this: I am more important than the other people in the store with me, and this activity of shopping or banking is an unimportant activity so I need to get it over with as soon as possible.
I hated myself for this attitude, because it seemed like a complete rejection of everything I have learned about the wisdom of accepting life the way it is!
After some weeks of attention to my regular displays of impatience, I became aware enough that in the moment, when I saw that I was going to have to wait in line, I could watch myself and monitor the irritation. By doing that I began to be able to release it. I still feel the irritation, but I am more and more successful at preventing the anger and rudeness.
Just this week I was in a grocery store, and there were many lines with a couple people waiting in each. I picked one that looked short—both of the two men ahead of me had only a few items. But then each man had trouble using the card swiper, it was as if they had never used one before, and by the time the second was through all the other lines had emptied out. While waiting I breathed deeply; I pulled my eyes away from the card scanner (where as usual I had locked on the source of inefficiency and was silently willing the person to get his act together) and gazed at the ceiling; I willed myself to be calm. When the clerk started on my groceries she smiled and said, “thanks for your patience,” and I felt a moment of completion. I even stayed and chatted with her a few moments after my groceries were bagged; life really isn’t about the most efficient use of my time!
I know I’m not alone in my hatred of waiting in line. Last month a man was stabbed at a post office because another man (incorrectly) thought he’d cut in line. I learned about this from a New York Times article, “Why Waiting is Torture”:
The day I’m working on this blog post, happy I can end it feeling as if I have really made a breakthrough, we get a couple of phone calls from talkative people who take 3 or 4 times as long to make a point than is at all necessary (from my point of view anyway!). I get very impatient with both callers. “These people’s minds are so unorganized,” I contemptuously comment to myself. “Why can’t they just say what they want without all the back story to rationalize it?”
As I hung up after the second one my husband Arthur said, “impatient Katie,” and I thought, “what a coincidence, I hadn’t told him I’d been thinking about patience today.” When I mentioned my realization of how impatient I get in the grocery line he replied, “Whoa, news flash!” Arthur could see my behavior clearly—I have a real problem with lines—but I couldn’t see it at all. My rationalizations for the behavior blinded me; my impatience was always fully justified in my mind so it didn’t appear to be coming from me.
Just another example of delusion: a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact. And just another illustration of insanity—you’d think I’d be in touch with such a basic aspect of my own personality, yet I was completely deluded.
I also thought after talking with Arthur, “Great, here’s my next area of patience to work on.”
In We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity I talk about how I thought for a long time that I wasn’t a competitive person and how startling it was when I realized that self-assessment is wrong. I am in fact a very competitive person. As long as I was convinced that my subjective belief “I am not competitive” was an objective fact, I was completely kidding myself. Now that I have exposed this belief as a lie, I may still be competitive but at least I am not so deluded about who I am.
Recently I have faced another area where I was mistaken about myself: patience. If you had asked me a few months ago if I was a patient person, I would have answered, “yes, I have a lot of patience.” One of my hobbies is weaving, and when people learn how many hours it takes just to set the loom up before weaving even starts, they can’t imagine having the patience to do that.
I hate to lose things because I feel that searching for a lost item is a frustrating waste of time and energy. As a consequence I am very organized and can almost always put my hands on anything in a very short time, no matter how long it’s been since that thing has been used.
I think of time and energy as finite resources that are extremely valuable, and I think I am right to conserve them, not squander them. So I feel justified in criticizing people who are sloppy and careless with their time and energy, particularly when their inefficiency impacts my life! If I’m impatient with their inefficiency, that’s not my problem, it’s their’s.
Recently I began a daily routine of mentally going back over my day, assessing my behavior towards the people I had interacted with that day (and this also included time on the phone with customer service representatives and telemarketers!). Did I feel impatience or anger? Was I rude? Was I even just a little grumpy? Was I withdrawn and apathetic?
It quickly became clear that I had a real problem with waiting. When I found myself in a long line at the grocery store or post office, or if a checkout person was slow, impatience would wash over me and I would start fuming. (I lived in a small town for many years and one of the things I loved best was I almost never had to wait anywhere—bank, post office, grocery store, etc.)
My rationalization for my anger was that waiting was inefficient, a total waste of time. I would end up being rude and extremely short with the poor clerk who ended up waiting on me.
As I thought about it, I realized that what I was saying was this: I am more important than the other people in the store with me, and this activity of shopping or banking is an unimportant activity so I need to get it over with as soon as possible.
I hated myself for this attitude, because it seemed like a complete rejection of everything I have learned about the wisdom of accepting life the way it is!
After some weeks of attention to my regular displays of impatience, I became aware enough that in the moment, when I saw that I was going to have to wait in line, I could watch myself and monitor the irritation. By doing that I began to be able to release it. I still feel the irritation, but I am more and more successful at preventing the anger and rudeness.
Just this week I was in a grocery store, and there were many lines with a couple people waiting in each. I picked one that looked short—both of the two men ahead of me had only a few items. But then each man had trouble using the card swiper, it was as if they had never used one before, and by the time the second was through all the other lines had emptied out. While waiting I breathed deeply; I pulled my eyes away from the card scanner (where as usual I had locked on the source of inefficiency and was silently willing the person to get his act together) and gazed at the ceiling; I willed myself to be calm. When the clerk started on my groceries she smiled and said, “thanks for your patience,” and I felt a moment of completion. I even stayed and chatted with her a few moments after my groceries were bagged; life really isn’t about the most efficient use of my time!
I know I’m not alone in my hatred of waiting in line. Last month a man was stabbed at a post office because another man (incorrectly) thought he’d cut in line. I learned about this from a New York Times article, “Why Waiting is Torture”:
Research on queuing has shown that, on average, people overestimate how long they’ve waited in a line by about 36 percent…
Perhaps the biggest influence on our feelings about lines, though, has to do with our perception of fairness. When it comes to lines, the universally acknowledged standard is first come first served: any deviation is, to most, a mark of iniquity and can lead to violent queue rage. Last month a man was stabbed at a Maryland post office by a fellow customer who mistakenly thought he’d cut in line…
Surveys show that many people will wait twice as long for fast food, provided the establishment uses a first-come-first-served, single-queue ordering system as opposed to a multi-queue setup. Anyone who’s ever had to choose a line at a grocery store knows how unfair multiple queues can seem; invariably, you wind up kicking yourself for not choosing the line next to you moving twice as fast.
But there’s a curious cognitive asymmetry at work here. While losing to the line at our left drives us to despair, winning the race against the one to our right does little to lift our spirits. Indeed, in a system of multiple queues, customers almost always fixate on the line they’re losing to and rarely the one they’re beating.
The day I’m working on this blog post, happy I can end it feeling as if I have really made a breakthrough, we get a couple of phone calls from talkative people who take 3 or 4 times as long to make a point than is at all necessary (from my point of view anyway!). I get very impatient with both callers. “These people’s minds are so unorganized,” I contemptuously comment to myself. “Why can’t they just say what they want without all the back story to rationalize it?”
As I hung up after the second one my husband Arthur said, “impatient Katie,” and I thought, “what a coincidence, I hadn’t told him I’d been thinking about patience today.” When I mentioned my realization of how impatient I get in the grocery line he replied, “Whoa, news flash!” Arthur could see my behavior clearly—I have a real problem with lines—but I couldn’t see it at all. My rationalizations for the behavior blinded me; my impatience was always fully justified in my mind so it didn’t appear to be coming from me.
Just another example of delusion: a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact. And just another illustration of insanity—you’d think I’d be in touch with such a basic aspect of my own personality, yet I was completely deluded.
I also thought after talking with Arthur, “Great, here’s my next area of patience to work on.”
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