About responsibilities and burdens
I know I’ve been talking a lot about self-responsibility, and the more I learn about it, the more I want to advocate it. In fact, one of these days I was telling a friend of mine how her ability to take on the responsibility to herself was one of the qualities I admired the most in her.
I’ve always had a hard time doing that. Remaining in the victim’s position feels safer and easier. But it’s also very dangerous.
There’s a fine line between neglecting your responsibilities and taking on too much of what’s not yours, and I’m still trying to understand how to navigate it. Like everything in life, this is a matter of balance.
When you choose not to look into how you’re to blame for the situations you’re in, you deprive yourself of the power to control your life. Once you deny having put yourself in a hard situation, you refuse the idea of having to get yourself out.
You leave it for the universe. If it’s its desire, the universe will find a way to help you.
But no one other than yourself has the power to control your destiny.
Realizing that is hard. You start to look at every situation in your life and notice how you might’ve created it yourself. If you are not careful, you’ll start to wonder if you’re to blame for all the problems in the world.
That’s where the fine line is. You’re not responsible for it all.
It takes a lot of hard work to start being able to identify what lies within the realm of your responsibility and what’s a burden you don’t have to carry.
If you think about it, it’s funny. You might be the person who’s neglecting your own responsibilities and at the same time trying to take on what’s not yours. The thing is that one thing is a consequence of the other.
There’s just so much you can carry yourself. If you are busy solving everyone else’s problem, you don’t have time for your own. And, sometimes, that is — even at a subconscious level — a way of self-defense. You find a way to tell yourself you don’t have time to deal with the problems that might be too frightening for you.
But carrying other people’s burdens is only going to weaken you and strip you from the strength you might need to fight your own battles. You can’t expect to carry the weight of the world in your shoulders and still be able to climb your mountains.
How to identify what’s yours and what’s not is the key but also the biggest challenge. For someone who’s addicted to helping, there’s always a reason to believe that you have something to do with every problem in the world. Even worse, for someone who’s afraid to deal with their own problems, occupying your time with others is the easiest way out.
What I have been trying to do is to question whether I can actually change a situation or not. I’ve come to the realization that when something is out of the realm of my responsibility, I might even try to do something, but the power to make a change is not mine.
If a friend has a problem they share with me, I’ll give them my shoulder to cry on and tell me them I got their backs. What I won’t do is try to solve their problems for them. That’s their burden to carry.
If a coworker tells me they’re struggling with a task or something work-related, I can ask if they need help and how I can help. If it’s within my boundaries, I’ll do what I can. What I won’t do is putting my own work aside to finish theirs. That’s their task to tackle.
Now, when the problems are mine, the power to solve them is completely in my hands. There’s no point in trying to neglect them because if I don’t do anything about them, no one else will.
It’s up to me, and only me, to have that difficult conversation I’ve been avoiding because I know how much of a headache it can be.
It’s up to me, and only me, to put into action that project I’ve been planning for so long but haven’t started only because I’m too scared to do so.
It’s up to me, and only me, to find a way out of situations that are uncomfortable, even if sometimes this decision might affect someone else. If I’m not harming them, it’s not my responsibility to worry about it.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve found myself stuck in situations in which I didn’t want to be only because I worried way too much about what my leaving would do to the others involved. A job I took to long to quit. A conversation I took too long to have. A contract I took too long to end. A partnership I took too long to break.
In worrying about the others, I neglected my own feelings. Instead of taking responsibility for what was mine, I felt responsible for what was theirs. Quitting my job last year was liberating, and the company survived without me — even if they struggled a bit to find a replacement, it wasn’t my duty to worry about it.
That was a turning point in my journey to realizing that I’m not expected to carry everyone’s burdens. What’s mine is enough.
