Make It Up Good!
In Rhonda Britten’s book, Change Your Life in 30 Days, she asks the question, “Are you making it up or is it true?” Designed for people to ask themselves when they find they are beating themselves up, making assumptions about some situation that’s bothering them.
We all tend to tell ourselves fantastically creative (yet thoroughly untrue) stories about what the other people in our lives are thinking or intending when they’re interacting with us. And one solution Rhonda offers, for the cases where clarification or verification is impossible, is to “Make it up GOOD!”
Meaning, if you’re going to make up intentions and reasons for the behavior of others, the LEAST you can do is make up a story that’s EMPOWERING to your self esteem.
Case in point: as many of you know, I’ve been single for a LONG time, and it’s been at least 12 months since I even considered liking a guy. Well, I met one I liked. I got all the signs a woman tends to get when a guy likes her and, scary as it was for me, I decided to give liking him a try. This was a HUGE step for me, as I have the frighteningly great skill of being as celibate as a nun for vast amounts of time when I feel that dating is out of my comfort zone…
So the fact that I consciously decided to be WILLING to like him was a TREMENDOUS risk for me. But, I did it. The next time I saw him, he seemed as interested as he’d been before.
Then SOMETHING happened.
I shared something personal about myself and as soon as I did, I could feel a wall slam down between he and I and from that moment on, it was like his feelings shut completely off. So much so that he even seemed to be avoiding me so that we wouldn’t have to be alone together again.
Now, the TRUTH is, I don’t know if what I said affected him in some adverse way, or if he suddenly had some internal issues pop up for himself, or if he was suddenly possessed by an alien and forgot I was human. I have no idea. And, since I don’t have his contact information to ask him what was actually going on, my creative mind WENT TO TOWN.
The town my mind went to was, “Bash Rebeccaville.”
My mind started swirling with the following thoughts:
~I’m too much, I said too much, see? No guy will ever like me!
~Would it have been better if I’d waited to say what I said? My timing SUCKS!
~He probably didn’t like you from the beginning.
~He must have FELT that you liked him and your energy was TOTALLY cloying!
~You TOTALLY messed it up.
Those creative, made up reasons are precisely what “Making it up GOOD” is designed to flush out of our systems.
All those nasty reasons I thought up had only one effect: Making me feel stupid, inadequate, and completely at fault. And since I have NO WAY of finding out what was actually true for him, how useful is it for me to think those things?
So, in a moment of clarity, I decided to MAKE IT UP GOOD.
~He’s not over his last girlfriend
~He got a migraine and lost all capacity to think straight.
~He’s got personal issues of his own that he JUST realized he needs to deal with that’s consuming him.
~He finds me SO attractive that I make him SO nervous he’s simply too afraid to talk to me now.
~He just realized he’s gay.
~He was possessed by aliens, just like I thought!
Now, none of those scenarios may be true either. BUT considering I may NEVER know the truth, they sure make me feel a hell of a lot better about myself and my worthiness. And the truth is, if it WAS something I did or said and he didn’t tell me or check it out with me before turning into an ice block, I wouldn’t want to date him ANYWAY.
So, in situations where you find yourself coming up with all kinds of reasons why someone rejected, disappointed, got angry with you—why not try making up reasons that keep you as the worthy good guy? They may not be any truer than the reasons that make you the bad guy, but at least you don’t have to do any self-esteem clean up for those situations where you’ll never know the truth ANYWAY!
So are you ready to Make It Up GOOD? I know I am!
It was aliens. Definitely!
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