I spoke tonight with my dear friend who is going through an eerily similar situation and one I've referenced in earlier blog posts. I wanted to catch her up on my revelations in Seattle, the fact that I did end up meeting my ex and the outcome of that encounter, and finally that overall I was in a better place emotionally than the last time we had spoken. Granted, the thoughts seem to be all consuming again, which wasn't the case before I met him, but I'm no longer crying daily, just really really sad.
After I shared all of my updates, she was able to fill me in on the status of her situation. The biggest news was that she has not seen her ex for over 2 weeks. This is HUGE because they were still hanging out on a very regular basis while she tried to do the "friend" thing. In addition, she has firmly drawn a line in the sand and set boundaries for the first time. For example, he texted her asking for a ride to the airport. She deliberated over this for some time because she has always done whatever he has asked. But she said no. I couldn't be more proud of her.
One insight she had is what I wanted to blog about today because I think it's brilliant. She decided to write down every memory she could think of that involved her ex, eventually stopping when she hit 300 as that seemed like a nice, healthy number. Then she went back and rated each of the memories on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being complete agony and 5 representing total bliss. The reason I think this was so ingenious is because it is an easy way to quantify something that is qualitative. It makes the subjective, objective.
Lo and behold, when she totaled all the numbers and divided the answer by 300, she came up with 2.78, which is below average. It wasn't even a 3. And it hit her like a ton of bricks because for so long she was not only settling for average, but she was actually seemingly okay with below average.
We are all guilty of skewing things in our minds. We would much rather remember the pleasant times than the unpleasant ones. But what if there were more unpleasant times and our brains, as a way of coping, simply made us forget? Or perhaps more accurately, what if our brains naturally placed more weight upon the good times than the bad? My friend fully admitted to this. She said for years she has blown the positive out of proportion and poo poo'd the negative. But having a number written in black and white was eye opening because she could no longer pretend her relationship was so great. Because it was below average.
While thinking of this, I came across an article that speaks about this topic and wanted to share.
Let's stop settling for average.
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