The People Who Drive Us Crazy

Think of something which drives you crazy. Is that something which drives you crazy a something which someone else does? Are there certain people who drive you crazy? Is one of those certain people you?

I’m already crazy…

but even though I’m already at that particular destination, there are still certain somethings and certain people doing those certain somethings which can drive me around the bend to crazy.

It’s really crazy-making when someone turns up at your place, insists that you get in the car because they need and want you to, come on, get in, you can’t say no, they’re in need, you have to help them to fulfill a want…

So you get in their car of need, they take you for a ride around the merry-go-round, then drop you back off at your place…

and then they charge you for it. You owe them for the favour they just did for you. WHAT!?! WTF just happened?

“If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.”

― Pema Chodron

At this point in my post…

You may think I’m going to go off on a rant or a ramble about narcissists. Nope. Not this time. Not in this post. Although… well, maybe, yes, I may end up mentioning narcissists.

Do people who change their mind or can’t make up their mind drive you crazy?

Before I write anything else, I’d like to introduce you to several bloggers and posts of theirs which I read recently, enjoyed reading, and which have partly inspired this post:

Sadje of Keep It Alive – Let Me Give You Some Advice!

Do people who give you unsolicited advice drive you crazy?

GC of The Main Aisle for Weekly Prompts – Word Prompt Trash Talk

Do people who throw their rubbish wherever they want drive you crazy?

Teresa of The Haunted Wordsmith – Most Asked Question – Why Did You Start Your Blog

Does being asked the same question over and over again drive you crazy?

Rory of That Guy Called Bloke And K9 Doodlepip – The Father I Never Knew…

Did one of your parents drive you crazy?

Brian Lageose of Bonnywood Manor – Past Imperfect #335

Do celebrities drive you crazy?

Leaping Toes of Oh, Border! – Convo with Universe

Do you drive yourself crazy?

Tanya of Salted Caramel – 50 posts, 100 followers, 500 likes : My journey.

Does blogging drive you crazy?

Carine De Lozier of Unsent Letters asked an interesting question on Pointless Overthinking – How does hypervigilance help/hurt?

Do your coping mechanisms/survival skills drive you crazy?

Julie Demboski of Julie Demoboski’s Astrology – 21 November 2018 Harmonious Chord

Does what you are hiding from yourself drive you crazy?

   

a piece of nature’s trash

  

I wasn’t completely sure (or even remotely sure) where I was going or what I was going to do with this post, but now it seems that I’m going to be answering those questions…

[but first it might help if I turn the blinds around so that the sun isn’t shining directly in my eyes… I’m having enough of a hard time seeing without being blinded by the light]

I’m starting with the last question first (I sometimes read blog posts, my own and those of others, backwards, from the last paragraph to the first. I’m not quite sure when I started doing that or why, but sometimes it makes reading easier).

Does what you are hiding from yourself drive you crazy?

Yes.

And I don’t just mean when I hide my glasses (or keys or something else which I suddenly need immediately and they’re not where they’re supposed to be) from myself and then go crazy trying to find them.

Last night, for the first time in a long time, I mentioned a post on my blog to my partner. He asked me what it was about, settled back to listen to me explain it, but instead I told him to read it. I was a bit hesitant about doing that.

I normally prefer it if he ignores my blog (he gets enough of my crazy offline). We spend a lot of time together and it’s good to have separate places where the other doesn’t go that often.

But this time I wanted him to go to my blog and read my post. Why? I knew he would probably forget or just not do it, especially right now because he’s working on a project which is keeping him ultra busy.

That project is probably why I wanted him to read my post. That project is a gift for his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. His whole family (except his parents of course) are pitching in and my partner is putting it together as the idea was his (well, mine – his parents told everyone not to buy gifts, but everyone wanted to give them something even though they’re very hard to buy gifts for… I’m quite adept at thinking of gifts which encompass something people love).

It’s one of those digital photo frames (don’t worry his parents won’t read this) which is being filled with family photos past and present… and atm it’s on a shelf in the sitting room being tested, so last night I kept seeing all their family photos dancing in front of my eyes. I’m in a few but mostly I’m not because while I’m family now I wasn’t always. It’s lovely to see… but I think it also made me feel left out.

Haha! My partner just bounded into my office and told me he’d read and loved the post. I’m so lucky ❤

If you read Julie Demboski’s post… you might notice what I’ve written here in answer to this particular question correlates with what she wrote about the astrology of the moment.

“The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.”

― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Do your coping mechanisms/survival skills drive you crazy?

Yes.

Sometimes.

I grew up with parents who were narcissists… living with narcissists tends to over-stimulate the primal instinct to be vigilant. Once hyper-vigilance is switched on, it’s hard to switch it off. So I’ve lived for decades with hyper-vigilance… it’s exhausting.

Even a short trip to the local shop can leave you drained of energy. It’s not just a quick pop there and back, you’re emerging from the safety of your cave (which is only safe because of all the checks and double-checks you do) and have to cross the jungle to get to the nearest village.

There are all sorts of predators and natural dangers for which you have to watch out, and you also have to keep an eye on yourself and your own stupidity, your self-sabotaging, self-destructive tendencies. Plus you have to try to appear normal, don’t draw attention to yourself, not like the freak, the Gollum, that you feel you are.

Once you reach the village, you’re still not safe because the most dangerous animal is the human one. They smile at you, are nice to you, but it might be a facade and behind it might be a vicious tyrant who wants to rip your heart out and serve it on a platter to the god they worship to appease the angry ravenous pit of need and greed within.

It’s only in the past few years that I’ve relaxed, and now when I go to the local shop I’m so spaced out that if aliens landed in the parking lot I probably wouldn’t notice until after they’d abducted me because I was the only person who didn’t run for cover and hide.

Hyper-vigilance is a close relative of awareness, mindfulness, of being observant and noticing what is there but which is sometimes subtle, hidden, and may appear invisible unless your observational skills have been turned up to eleven. It can be very helpful… as it lets you see more of people, of places, and lets you in on many of the secrets which are out in the open but often missed.

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”

― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

Does blogging drive you crazy?

YES!!!

Mostly it’s a fun kind of crazy.

And blogging has also helped me to be less crazy. As I write posts, as I rant, as I whine, as I grumble, as I argue, as I babble, as I play the fool, as I silently SCREAM, or noisily whisper… I listen and hear myself. I’ve always talked to myself, with myself, but not quite in the way that I do when I blog. It’s a communion and reunion between all the different facets of me.

One of the most intriguing aspects of blogging is the relationship a blogger has with their blog… it tells you a lot about your relationship with yourself, and with others.

Sometimes bloggers ghost their blog. They break up with them. Go No Contact. Delete them. Start over. Rinse and repeat. Treat them badly. Kiss and make up. Love them addictively, obsessively, too much, then suddenly… silence. And many of the other things we do in relationships with people.

And yes, I’ve done all of those things and more with my blog (well, I haven’t deleted this one yet although I have come very close to doing that a few times, but I’ve blogicided before)… right now, we’re in a good phase after a bit of a stormy phase.

I’d like to thank everyone who has stuck around through thick and thin with me and my blog and our tumultuous relationship… you’ve helped me a lot to grow up, be less of a brat, embrace the positive side of being such a mistake-making mess, and I hope I’ve helped you too (even if it’s just giving you someone who is messier and crazier than you to point at and sigh with relief – Well, at least, I’m not like her or her! 😉)

Which reminds me… of an excellent post I read the other day on a really great blog:

Veronica Jarski of The Invisible Scar – How Keeping a Journal Helps Your Mental Health & Emotional Healing

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. ”

― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Do you drive yourself crazy?

Yes.

Someone has to pilot this mess, and it might as well be me.

I’ve had other people try to pilot my crazy and there were many crashes… they did not survive!

I’m doing it right now as I write this because I’m telling myself this post is too long and needs to be shorter but I like my long posts because I can hide stuff in the length and it puts people off reading them so they won’t find what I’ve hidden in the posts but then again I love it when people read my posts and love it when they chime in share their views but they’re less likely to do that if I’ve written a novel and said so much that…

So I thought I’d break this up into smaller posts but should I do a post for each question and my answer? But I’ve linked this post to the Weekly Prompts challenge and that might confuse things if I don’t do that first in this post however I haven’t felt inspired to answer that question yet but I have answered others because I felt the flow flowing for those and…

breathe… [Gosh I love the new WordPress editor!!! It makes writing posts so much easier, you can just duplicate blocks and shift them around where you need them… I think I like it partly because it works in a similar manner to my mind 😉 ]

So I’m going to break it up a bit but also not break it up… whatever I’ve answered here I’ll leave… no… no… yes… yes… we’ll figure it out later!

“I used to have a sign pinned up on my wall that read: Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us…It was all about letting go of everything.”

― Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Do celebrities drive you crazy?

Yes and no.

Celebrity culture is fascinating… it can also be very boring. It depends on what is revealed – which is sometimes what is being kept hidden.

I went through a period of being addicted to celebrity gossip. Partly because I was bored with myself and my life was ugh! at the time… I needed a glossy escape. These days I only have one celebrity gossip site I visit… two… actually two, forgot about the other one.

I particularly like to read the comments on the celeb gossip blog posts because it’s insightful about human nature – mine and that of others.

It never ceases to interest me how blind we humans are to our double standards. How we’ll be critical and judgemental towards someone for being critical and judgemental… and won’t notice we’re doing the very thing we’re criticising and judging them for doing.

Or we’re not doing for others what we think others should be doing for us, and we’re perplexed and annoyed that they aren’t doing it for us. If you’re not interested in people… why should people be interested in you?

Noticing stuff like that… is incrementally helping me to be less of a dick (or maybe it’s making me more of a dick).

“Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know.”

― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

   

a pretty piece of someone else’s trash found on the side of the road (I’m moonvoodoo btw – or I was until I deleted the account and ended that relationship, it was a conscious uncoupling)

   

Did one of your parents drive you crazy?

Yes.

Both of my parents were stark raving crazy. They often said exactly that loudly and proudly.

And they both were supremely talented at driving each other even crazier and making everyone around them go crazy.

And that’s how I ended up climbing the walls to lie on the ceiling. It was the only place to get a moment’s respite and rest.

“Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment. We feel that someone else knows what is going on, but that there is something missing in us, and therefore something is lacking in our world.”

― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Does being asked the same question over and over again drive you crazy?

Yes.

However only when it’s the same question asked by the same person, and I’ve already answered them more than once – I get that they may have not been listening to my answer the first time, maybe they didn’t understand what I said the second time, but by the third time it’s going to start getting on my nerves… anything after that and I’m no longer concentrating on my answer because I don’t need to – I know it by heart, instead I’m fantasising about what I’d like to do to them the next time they ask me the same question… if they’re a narcissist, it’s definitely going to happen again and again, ad nauseum ad infinitum, because they’re stuck in a loop, play, erase, rewind, play, erase, rewind, play.

I don’t mind at all if it’s the same question asked by different people.

This question was inspired by Teresa of The Haunted Wordsmith’s post about being asked over and over – Why did you start your blog – in blog award nomination posts. In that post Teresa had a conversation with herself about her blog’s stats and what they meant or didn’t mean to and for her and her blog.

(ps. when you have more Like’s than views on a post in your stats it means that the blogger who ‘Liked’ your post read it in the WP reader – it won’t register as a ‘view’ unless they click to read the post on your blog, which is why some bloggers only share excerpts of their posts in the reader and force you to click to go to their blog to read more).

If you’re a blogger who is driving yourself a bit nuts with your stats… I’ve been there, done that… it’s part of the blogging experience (and your relationship with yourself through your blog), and there are many different ways of looking at and using your blog’s stats.

It helped me a lot at the beginning of my tussle with stats, and how they poke and prod you where you pretend they’re not, to research online and on WordPress, and read posts like these:

WordPress.com – Stats Wrangling I: Digging into Your Data

The Daily Post – Blogging 201: Drive Traffic to Your Archives

Online, if you have a problem, a member of the A-Team has most likely already solved it for you in a post somewhere, you just have to find them.

“We are like children building a sand castle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off limits to others. We’re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.”

― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Do people who throw their rubbish wherever they want drive you crazy?

Yes.

I wish I could stop doing that. I wish we all could gather together and figure out how to stop doing that.

That rubbish which those of us who are being conscientious about putting in the right bag, container, bin, etc… gets picked up, dumped into a truck, taken away from us, driven out to a field or shipped to another country, and dumped in a huge mess in the middle of nowhere which is right near a house, home, like yours or mine, with people like you and me in it.

But that’s no longer our problem because we did our duty and were very proper and clean, kept our neighbourhood neat and tidy. Got the stink out from under our noses.

That bothers me.

I sometimes find myself trying to solve that puzzle, but all I’ve come up with is using an active volcano… however it was pointed out to me that this solution was most probably a terrible idea for the planet… and especially for the people living next to that volcano.

“It is possible to move through the drama of our lives without believing so earnestly in the character that we play. That we take ourselves so seriously, that we are so absurdly important in our own minds, is a problem for us. We feel justified in being annoyed with everything. We feel justified in denigrating ourselves or in feeling that we are more clever than other people. Self-importance hurts us, limiting us to the narrow world of our likes and dislikes. We end up bored to death with ourselves and our world. We end up never satisfied.”

― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

Do people who give you unsolicited advice drive you crazy?

Yes.

And no.

Unsolicited advice has saved my life a couple of times. Probably more. If you’re about to cross a busy road and someone stops you with a hand… they’re physically giving you unsolicited advice. You did not ask them for help, but they gave it to you.

I work with my partner, he gives me unsolicited advice all the friggin time and… what’s really annoying about it is that he’s right and yes, that just made what I was doing ten times easier! Dammit thank you!

But I am the sort of person who doesn’t tend to ask for advice or help on a regular basis. I learned to do that when I was a child because asking those around me for help often ended in disaster… if only I had just done it my way, grumble, grumble, if only I had kept quiet, shhh, shhh.

Other people have a lot of experience, knowledge, information which they generously share, sometimes freely online for all to access if they need it. Sometimes at a price.

  

random Monopoly cards I found in my garden after a windy day

   

So when someone offers me unsolicited advice, I like to hear it, and will take it into consideration because you never know when it will be useful, helpful, a life-saver.

As long as the unsolicited advice giver is happy with just giving the unsolicited advice and doesn’t expect anything from me other than perhaps a thank you (but really if I didn’t ask and you gave it… still, it’s the polite thing to do), then everything is peachy. I don’t mind as long as they don’t mind if I ignore their advice and keep going along as I was before.

If however the unsolicited advice giver thinks that their gift of unsolicited advice is an order, and I must do what they’ve just told me to do… or else they’ll keep nagging me until I do. They may end up wishing they’d ignored me and their urge to give unsolicited advice to me.

“Be grateful to everyone” is about making peace with the aspects of ourselves that we have rejected… If we were to make a list of people we don’t like – people we find obnoxious, threatening, or worthy of contempt – we would discover much about those aspects of ourselves that we can’t face… other people trigger the karma that we haven’t worked out.”

― Pema Chödrön, Comfortable with Uncertainty: 108 Teachings on Cultivating Fearlessness and Compassion

Do people who change their mind or can’t make up their mind drive you crazy?

Yes… No… Yes… Hmmm… no…

Hang on a minute…

I need to have a long chat with myself about this and see what we all have to say about it… it may take a while…

Do you want tea or coffee while you wait? What… you’re leaving but you’ve only just arrived… I have cookies… nice cookies…

“We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.”

― Pema Chödrön, Living Beautifully: with Uncertainty and Change

The end… or is it the beginning… maybe it’s a middle!?

   

I hate that slogan and thought it was funny to see it thrown away as trash on the side of the road.

   

That’s it from me… Over to you!

If you do a post with any of these questions, pingback or pop the link in the comments here (or both), I’m interested and avid to read what you write.

Feel free to answer in the comments… be warned, I do reply and I might take you along for a ride on my crazy skates.

“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”

― Pema Chödrön

*Featured image is from Noble Works Cards – the funny greeting card store! (and no, I’m not getting paid to promo them, I just love that image – needy/wanty people drive me crazy – and hope they don’t mind my using it)