In the world of social media, an unbothered queen is in a league of her own. Confident and successful, she is admirably unaffected by her haters and the dysfunction around her. Instead, she chooses to be so wrapped up in her own business she has no time or interest to entertain those who have negative things to say about her. She is who we all want to be…. but struggle to embody regardless.
The relentless attention economy we live in has gotten very good at harnessing collective outrage in order to garner views. When you understand more people define themselves and their moral integrity based on their political views and/or who and what they socially support, getting people’s attention isn’t a hard thing to do. Because you can easily take advantage of a very simple fact: most people are emotional volcanoes. They are constantly looking for the next thing to blow up and gossip with a close friend. You have someone close to you that did you wrong? They better make sure they are prepared to get an earful with some sassy clap backs to boot. Someone cosigned a politician or political belief system that you don’t believe in? They better strap up and get ready for the thesis and PowerPoint you have on hand just for situations like these.
We are always ready to show the world how confident we are, how much we know, and how we won’t take the garbage the world has to offer us. So much so that we are unable to understand that most of the time no one cares and no one likes a talker. Talkers spend so much time talking they don’t have enough time to think about what to do. People do respect those who lead with their actions. Those people don’t need to tell the world who they are because they put so much work into embodying who they want to be.
But an unbothered queen isn’t just too occupied with their own life. She also understands that other people’s actions (especially their treatment of you) have very little to do with them. People tend to treat others the way they treat themselves and base their perceptions of the world on their own beliefs, fears, and insecurities.
Knowing this fundamentally altered the way I deal with people and see my interactions with them. It put into perspective the fact that relationships, regardless of how superficial, are a dance of two, and the only moves I can control are my own. Everything else falls on the shoulders of my partner. Practicing detachment with others, even those close to us is crucial to maintaining a firm line between us and the rest of the world.
Many of us walk around wanting to see people do well for themselves and we feel like we have the answer. So when we see people in pain, we will drop everything that we’re doing to help them. We’ll hold interventions for our best fried to make her see why she needs to leave her toxic boyfriend. We’ll hold pep talks to get them to get their life together. But people don’t make progress unless they are well and truly ready to make it and sometimes they need to endure a lot of pain, and suffering, and hit rock bottom before they are ready to do so.
Although it may be difficult to watch, helping people before they are ready will only put you in a painful position. People tend not to like those who think higher of themselves then they do. Doing so not only risks revealing truths they may not be ready to face but also may bring up feelings of shame about their situation and how they came to be in it. So instead of welcoming you with open arms and a big thank you, they will lash out and drag you down along with them.
Practicing detachment means empathizing with them and their position but ultimately allowing people the distance they need to come to certain realizations on their own. It means understanding that no amount of pep talks, convincing, and nagging will help them see things that they are not ready to see. An unbothered human respects that we are here on this planet to learn our own lessons but understands to never sacrifice her life to help someone else do so.
With the lines between other people’s lives and your own drawn in the sand, an unbothered queen is able to see when other people’s problems are other people’s problems and when her problems are her problems She moves through the world knowing that in order to live an empowered life requires you take the full brunt of the responsibility necessary to do so. Someone violates your boundaries more times than is ok? They don’t need to be in your life. You do wrong to someone? You apologize and make a real effort to mean it. Is there something not going right in your life? You accept the possibility of how you play a role of getting in your own way and figure out how to get out of it. She doesn’t give herself the space to make excuses for her failures or try to pass the buck off to someone else just because she’s afraid to get her hands dirty. Doing so may relieve her of responsibility in the short term but in the long term will give someone else the power to control her emotions and her outcomes. Both of which are just not acceptable.
Being unbothered and confident comes easier to some than others. It may be due to the amount of role models a person had or the makeup of someone’s environment growing up, but it also has to do with the speed they are able to reflect on, learn and apply hard lessons. Those who take longer to learn will have a much harder time than those who only need one or two times. As someone who considers myself to be part of the latter, I think at its core being unbothered and confident comes down to what you are willing to do to take care of and choose yourself. What ends are you willing to go to secure your own happiness and future? At some point when you find yourself in situations that force you to choose between someone else and you, the most obvious choice becomes you.
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