The Pitfalls and Possibilities of Taking It Personally

May we recognize when the voices in our heads are like wild turkeys, may we learn to laugh at and love those voices too, and may we rest in the part of us that is laughing.

I round the bend and see two wild turkeys ahead of me along the road.

As I approach them on my bike, they turn and run in a feathery flurry of disjointed movements. The problem is, they’re running parallel to the road on which I’m riding, so I keep gaining on them.

And these two characters clearly think they’re the subject of my pursuit.

They start squawking. I draw closer. They flap their wings. I get even closer. They take flight in a gangly panic. Still I chase them in all their clucking clamor, until finally they peel off into the forest, presumably to hide from the demon on two wheels hell-bent on destroying them.

As I leave them behind, I’m laughing out loud. Not because the turkeys were ridiculous—though they were—but because just an hour earlier I’d been acting like those turkeys.

I’d been personalizing something that had nothing to do with me.

I’d woken with a lot of head chatter about a relationship of mine, because our last communication had been ever so slightly…off. “Here we go,” a forlorn voice was saying as I awoke, “you can’t keep people around. Everyone eventually bores of your schtick.”

By the time my eyes opened, another voice had taken over. “What did I do wrong?” it asked. “How can I repair it?” This voice spends a tremendous amount of time sifting through the detritus of recent experiences in search of something to fix.

“Text them,” another more authoritative-sounding voice said. “Say something clever. When they text you back, you’ll feel better.” This voice is seductive, because there’s a lot of truth to it: if I get some reassurance that all is well, I’ll feel more at ease in the short term. However, as

Kat Torres

illustrates in her recent Substack post about quieting the inner critic, instant relief will have robbed me of the opportunity to listen to my personalizing, to learn from it, and to find the possibilities in it.

The Pitfalls of Personalizing

Personalizing is the tendency to assume that what’s happening around you has everything to do with you. Of course, every once in a while it does. For instance, if you choose to run naked across the field at a professional sporting event, you’re probably accurate to personalize the security guards tackling you. Otherwise, most of what’s happening to us actually has relatively little to do with us.

Of course, I’m not saying we should shirk responsibility for how we show up. I’m simply suggesting that taking ownership for how we’re showing up may mean wrestling with our tendency to make it all about us.

Someone once said something to me that really hurt. I told my wife about it and asked what the person could possibly have been thinking of me to say something like that. She responded, “I don’t think they were thinking of you at all.” She was right. I was personalizing their journey as if I were an integral part of it, and then feeling the need to protect myself from it.

After all, as soon as we personalize something, we have to protect against it.

If it’s a pleasurable thing we’re personalizing, we have to protect against losing it and thus losing our happiness along with it. If it’s a painful thing, we have to protect against feeling what happened and the possibility that it could very well happen again. Either way, cue the inner chatter…

The Possibilities of Personalizing

I used to call my inner chatter “head trash.” I don’t call it that anymore. I call it my psychology. My personality. My neuroses. My history. My insecurity. My pain. My wounds. It’s my whole story and my entire nervous system distilled down into some distressing mental banter. So, instead of calling it head trash, I try to be tender toward it.

And I try to recognize the me being tender to me is also me.

This tender me is pretty spacious. It has plenty of room for tortured me. It is even a little amused by chattering me, the way you might be amused by a kid playing in mud up to his elbows—he’s a mess, and you’ll have to clean him up, but the innocence of it is still sort of endearing.

So, with the turkeys in the treetops somewhere behind me, I’m ready to listen a little more lovingly to my inner chatter. I notice it is showing me how much I care about this person, and how much I appreciate having them in my life. I notice how vulnerable it feels to value something that could vanish. I notice that truly caring for this person is about allowing them to have a less than stellar moment in my presence, without making it about me.

I look up.

I notice there is a single cloud in the sky, surrounded by blue. I notice the inner chatter is still there, but it is surrounded on all sides by space. It’s no longer the sky; it’s the cloud. I’m the sky.

That’s the possibility of it all, probably—becoming the sky.

Becoming the peace in which the personalizing happens. Not running from it. Not squawking at it. Not managing it. Not doing anything to it at all, really.

May we recognize when the voices in our heads are like wild turkeys,

may we learn to laugh at and love those voices, too,

and may we rest in the part of us that is laughing,

on an otherwise beautiful morning.

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