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A friend told me a story recently that stuck with me. He had dropped something and broken it, and his immediate reaction was to say out loud, “You idiot.” His wife looked at him and said, in all seriousness, “Watch it. That’s my husband you’re talking about.”
I loved that response. She wasn’t giving him a lecture about self-compassion or telling him he needed to be kinder to himself. She just heard him talking about someone she loved in a way she wouldn’t have allowed anyone else to.
Not long after that, I was in my kitchen when I turned around and somehow caught a bowl of spaghetti sauce with the ladle still sitting in it. Sauce went everywhere. The stove, the wall, the floor. I stood there for a second looking at the mess, and then I cleaned it up.
It wasn’t until later that I realized something was missing. Normally, an accident like that would have started the commentary in my head almost immediately, and it wouldn’t have been very nice. Shit! What’s wrong with you? What a klutz!
That’s much closer to the way I could talk to myself when I screwed something up. Apparently, making a mess wasn’t enough. I also needed to make sure the guy who made it felt bad about himself. But this time, none of that happened. I made a mess and cleaned it up. When I thought about it later, I remember wondering, Who was that guy in the kitchen?
I can’t say for certain that my friend’s story had anything to do with it. Maybe his wife’s words were sitting somewhere in the back of my mind. Maybe I’ve simply gotten a little better at not beating myself up over every mistake. Whatever the reason, what struck me was that I hadn’t even noticed anything was different at the time.
I think when we look for signs of personal growth, we tend to notice the things we’re doing differently. Maybe we’re a little more patient, or we handle a difficult conversation better than we would have a few years ago. Maybe we catch ourselves before saying something we’ll regret.
But what about the things that don’t happen anymore? The criticism that never gets started, the argument we no longer feel the need to win, or the mistake we don’t spend the next three hours replaying in our heads. I wonder how often those changes go unnoticed simply because there’s nothing there to notice. Something happens that once would have ruined our afternoon, and now it’s just something that happened.
That’s pretty much what took place in my kitchen. There was no big breakthrough or moment of enlightenment. Just spaghetti sauce all over the place and a mess that needed cleaning up. It was only later that I realized moving on was the part that was different.
And it got me wondering how many other things have quietly changed over the years without my even realizing it. Maybe you’ve experienced something similar. Something that used to get under your skin doesn’t bother you quite as much. Or you make a mistake and, instead of spending the rest of the day beating yourself up, you just move on.
I know I still have plenty to work on. That hasn’t changed. But maybe, every once in a while, it’s worth paying attention to the things we don’t do anymore.
We might discover we’ve come a little further than we thought.
