by Deniz Sidali, M.A.
I have often wondered about the topic of relativity. No, not Albert Einstein’s ground breaking Theory of Relativity in physics. But, rather a different kind of relativity. How human beings are relative in many aspects and ways to one another, as well as themselves. While growing up, I often thought that my mother was quite harsh and unloving towards me. I never felt that anything I did was good enough to meet either of my parents’ high expectations and standards.
Positive reinforcement or praise in the form of “Good job Deniz. I am really proud of you”, were unheard of and probably foreign concepts to parents who were in fact foreigners living in a new land. Where they came from, parents only showed affection towards their children by kissing them on the forehead while they were sleeping at night, so as not to spoil them with over affection. So why was I surprised when I didn’t get a congratulatory response one day at age 18, when I informed my parents of the great news that I was accepted into an Ivy League University only to hear my mother reply, “Don’t think you are better than anyone just because you got into Columbia University. We have a lot of intelligent and attractive people in our family.”
At the time, I was very angry and hurt when she said this to me. “What was the point?”, I asked myself, if my parents couldn’t be happy for me and recognize my hard work. Years later, although my mother cannot seem to recollect saying these words to me, I remember not only the initial impact but what she truly meant. My mother was actually doing me a huge favor by bracing me for the future and quite possibly reality. As I quickly realized, coming from a small, all girls catholic high school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, I was a big fish in a small pond. At the time, I thought I had it all – great grades, popularity, looks, acknowledgment. The possibilities for my future were endless. Then, I started my freshman year at an Ivy League University and all of my hopes and dreams were shattered. Everyone at college seemed to be better than me, have more than me, and out-shined me. Many were high school valedictorians and prestigious award winners. Unlike me, they came from rich families, were attractive, popular, and all had big dreams. I was now a small fish in a big pond. And I didn’t like it. I didn’t like how I felt. I had a difficult time processing and accepting the fact that others were better than me in many respects. I lost sight of the fact that I was equally as intelligent and competent as these other students or else I wouldn’t have been accepted. The problem wasn’t that these other students were better than me. The real issue was that I thought there shouldn’t be anyone better than me because I am the best. I was being egocentric and a bit narcissistic in my thinking and beliefs.
As is often difficult for most people to realize and accept, the problem may lie within ourselves and not our surroundings or the universe. The simple fact of the matter that I came to realize is that, “Everything is relative”. There are people who are more intelligent than us and less intelligent than us. There are people who are more beautiful than us and less beautiful than us. There are people who are wealthier than us and less wealthier than us, etc. I think you get the picture. So basically we can assume that everything is relative…..beauty, intelligence, wealth, happiness, misery, etc. So why does this matter? Well for one, human beings like to infer that they are better than average. I mean we all like to think or state that we are above average. But can everyone be above average all the time in everything? The truth of the matter is that above average performance in every area is not sustainable for any one. And sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard we try. We may end up performing at or below average. We can merely strive to do our best. In their New York Times bestseller, Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman & Tversky eloquently proceed to explain why human beings cannot perform optimally all the time. They refer to this concept as regression towards the mean. No matter how hard we work, people who are highly skilled in particular areas will eventually perform worse than their personal best. In a similar vein, people who exhibit a low level of performance will eventually do better. So not only is our performance relative to one another, it is not sustainable.
In REBT terminology, can we accept this, tolerate it, and live with the fact that we will never be the best at something all of the time from now until infinity? Can we tolerate that just because we don’t perform optimally all of the time, it does not mean we are a failure or infer we are worthless human beings? Can we unconditionally accept and love ourselves even in the face of our limitations, competition, and performance waxing and waning? Can we unconditionally accept life and the fact that we will win some and we will lose some? And what will this mean for us? Will anyone remember or care twenty years from now that you lost a spelling bee? Are we striving for excellence or placing stringent expectations upon ourselves that we may not meet? We lose sight of the fact that we are failing to meet our self-imposed high expectations. But, can we realize and accept that we are setting ourselves up for failure and that this may trigger our irrational beliefs and rigid thinking about ourselves (i.e., what we are capable of, where we should be in life, the person we ought to be, etc). The fact of the matter is that we define ourselves narrowly by the information we choose to focus on to fulfill our narrative or core beliefs that we have constructed about ourselves. It’s like the analogy people use for the Olympics. There is the winner (who wins the gold medal) and then second (silver) and third (bronze) place losers. Even if these competitors lose by a narrow margin of milliseconds, we dismiss all their hard work in one moment and refer to them as losers. Maybe this is because we need to make sense of bad things happening to good, hard-working people. Why must there be losers or winners? Instead, can’t we call them people who tried their personal best at that moment. It’s not about the A or activating events (wealth, beauty, intelligence, etc). It’s about our mindset, and how we can change our mindset by changing our thoughts and how we perceive our experiences. I prefer the mantra, “I am doing the best that I can at this time,but would like to do better in the future”. This quote represents the fact that we can always strive to do better, but there is no guarantee that if we strive to do better we will do better.
The only thing we know for sure is that everything is relative. No one holds a position of power for long. Every great empire ends. History has taught us this much. But what history fails to teach us is how to think, feel, behave and accept the fact that all good things may come to an end, but our worth as human beings never changes.
