Why my relationships are all about me

    It sounds like a selfish statement, but let me explain.  When it comes down to it, really comes down to the bottom line, I’m the only person in this world that I can control.  Believe me, I’ve tried!  But I’m the only one that I can control, which means, I’m the only person whose salvation I can guarantee.  I’m the only person who’s standing with the lord I can have a say in.  Sure, the choices we make affect others and others act according to our own actions, but even in that moment, I cannot choose for that person what they should feel or what they should do, I can only choose what my next action is going to be.

    Let me explain a bit.  I came from a family who tired their hardest, but weren’t perfect (for the record, I have yet to meet a family that has reached perfection, just sayin’). Don’t get me wrong, my parents did the absolute best they could given what they had going on inside. But doing your best and giving all you can, at the time, still doesn’t make your kid exempt from having issues in the future.  Doing your best doesn’t magically wipe away any dysfunction that might exist, no matter how well intentioned you are. So my family wasn’t perfect, neither was I. 

When I came home off my mission, I was a changed woman, as most missionaries are, and struggled to re-adjust to the “real” life.  Now, maybe all missionaries go through this, but once again, this is all about me, so stay with me on this.  Returning from my mission, I felt enormous pressure for things, including myself, to go back to the way they were before my mission.  I had changed too much, and for my world to reach equilibrium, I was going to have to go back to who I used to be.  Who I used to be was the golden child, the peacemaker, and the clown.  Who I used to be was also extremely low in self-confidence, self-esteem, pretty ignorant to the global world, and very immature. 

My mission, I felt, was a pivotal point in my life.  I felt like I was finally figuring out who I really was.  I was learning how to hone natural skills I had been blessed with, and I was building great amounts of confidence. 

Coming home I felt like I was forced to choose between the two different versions of myself.  Looking at my life as a missionary, I felt much like Joseph Smith, the things I had learned couldn’t be unlearned.  I knew it, and I knew God knew that I knew it, and I could not deny it.  I couldn’t unlearn things and I couldn’t go back to who I was any more than you can force a square peg into a round hole. So, after much inner turmoil, and counseling, and prayer and fasting, I ended up cutting off all contact with my family. That’s about the time I moved up here to Moscow, Idaho. 

    For about five years, I had no contact with my family.  I struggled to overcome a lot of past, to be honest with myself about who I was, who my family were, and to be honest about my relationship with my Father in Heaven.  What I found out, was that The Lord had to tear down everything I thought about how things were “supposed” to work, and He had to re-teach me everything from the ground up.  I think it is C.S. Lewis that uses the parable of the mansion that is getting a remodel in comparison with our lives in The Lord’s hands.  I felt like a mansion that was not only getting remodeled, but also getting downsized to a shack. Turns out, I wasn’t as amazing as I thought I was.

    On the other hand I wasn’t as horrible as I thought I was either.  I found out that my family members were human.  I found out that my Father in Heaven wasn’t, that in fact, He was perfect.  And I found out, that ultimately, it is all about me. 

During it all, I wished that my loved-ones could see how badly I had been hurting trying to fit back into life after my mission.  I wished so badly that they could all see their potential and reach for it, as I had learned to do.  I wished that they could understand things from my perspective.  But I had/have no control over anyone, I only have control over me, and over what I am going to do in this moment.  I learned that staying where I was, wishing for all those things outside of me to change, was insanity and, actually, it would hold me back from my own growth. 

   Now, at this point, some of you might be wondering, “but what about your family?  How did they handle it?  How could you do that to them?”  Well, that’s what I’m trying to tell you, is that just as much as my relationships are all about me, so were each of my family member’s relationships with me, about them.  I’m SURE that it was painful, and there were a lot of hurt and angry feelings.  And they have every right to those feelings. I left them in the dust!  But here’s the thing, no matter what they were feeling, those were THEIR feelings, not mine.  I could not feel those feelings for them and I could not spare them those feelings.  Just like Heavenly Father couldn’t take the cup away from the Savior.  None of us can spare our family members from the pain that we cause them.  Now, I’m not trying to justify my actions by claiming to be anything like the Savior, nor am I saying we should go around hurting each other’s feelings because “that’s their problem”, but what I am saying, what I learned, is that I cannot lock myself up so tight, and not let myself feel, shine, or grow, with all my epic failures that come along with it just to spare someone else from feeling something that they don’t like feeling.  For me, that meant total separation from my family in order to sort myself out.  That’s rather drastic!  I don’t recommend it, if you can avoid it. But for me, it was absolutely necessary! 

Again, my point is this.   My relationships are about me.  I choose how I’m going to act in them, and that means making the choice of whether or not I am going to be acted upon.  It also means taking on extreme amounts of responsibility for your actions, and I learned quickly that the lens of kindness is the best one to look out of when determining what my choices are going to be. 

I chose to open my heart up to my Heavenly Father and start from scratch building a relationship with Him.  I chose to learn what healthy relationships are supposed to look like, and then I chose to start patterning my relationships after those healthy relationships.  I made the heartbreaking decision to cut off contact with my family, knowing that the only way I could be of any help to my family was to make myself healthy first.  And then I chose after five years, and with the help of my Heavenly Father, to finally forgive, put past perceived wrongs behind me and start building a relationship with my family again from scratch. 

I have no control over my family’s feelings or choices, which means in some cases that there may not be as much of a relationship as I would like, but I can still make the choice to love and support them in the ways that I can. 

So, when you think about it, it’s really quite glorious, because that means, that when one of my friends or family members makes a “mistake” (I put it in quotes, because 9 times out of 10 I’m the one who perceives it to be a mistake when it’s actually not) in the relationship department, I am the one that can choose to take that grief to my Heavenly Father and ask Him to help me understand it and overcome it, because, hey, they were just acting in their own self interest.  That provides me with a tremendous amount of freedom to choose to love my loved-ones, period.  I have the freedom to choose to forgive them.  I have the freedom to ask my Heavenly Father to help me with those things because I cannot do them on my own, but I have the freedom to ask.  It’s all about me.  That’s what I fought for in the pre-existence.  That’s what we fought for in the pre-existence.  The freedom to choose… for ourselves.