I must have looked like the most pathetic loser on the planet at that moment (his buddies were there too…
First, no. You’re not right on this. Or to be more exact the only person on the planet who sees it that way is you. The problem is, your opinion is the only one that matters.
But there’s a more fundamental thing going on in your sentence. The underlying premise is that Who You Are is at least defined by other people. You look to other people to help define you, for you. We really don’t know who we are. We don’t know ourselves. Literally, our self.
We all tend to do it. This deep thing, wired into us as social animals, goes unexamined in most peoples lives.
Imagine for a second that in fact, you did know yourself. That you did have your own compass, and it always pointed north no matter which way the wind blew. Nobody else defined you, only you defined you. External opinions now are more like turbulence that makes the trip bumpy rather than steering currents that control your path.
In this case, assuming what you say about his buddies is true that they are laughing at you, why would it even matter? How could you see them as anything other than POS? And why would you care about the opinion of POS?
I actually don’t think anyone was laughing at you at all, but if you use that fact to rationalize away the pain you’re missing out on an opportunity to more deeply examine why it is you thought that way in the first place. That should be your point of attack.
If you look inward, you’ll see that an awful lot of things that we accept as truths are in fact false, yet they run our lives to an amazing extent. Once you know this, you can disarm them. Once you’ve done that, it will improve all aspects of your life.
From the Mary Oliver poem…
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
[This message edited by HouseOfPlane at 6:00 PM, Thursday, July 4th]
