First let it be said that I am a gardener. This puts me into that group of individuals who will complain that it’s too hot or that it’s too cold. The rainfall is never just right, of course. It’s too wet or too dry. Have you ever heard a gardener praise the weather for being just right? Another tribulation in the life of a gardener consists of the multitude of living creatures, great and small, who consider themselves entitled to partake of the fruits of the gardener’s labor. I am now accustomed to watching robins and blue jays raise their young on my raspberries. They teach them the best techniques for swooping in, gaining a momentary perch, grabbing the berry and retreating to higher ground to savor its sweetness. This year I saw one of the parent blue jays sitting on the fence staring at the not quite ripe berries for an extended period of time. I had the impression it was waiting for the berries to ripen. And once when I was in the patch picking raspberries, one of the robin parents was nearby and was passionately expressing its displeasure at my activity. It did not want to share.
There are also the rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, possums, raccoons, skunks and ground hogs who are all in it for their piece of the harvest. Let us not forget the biggest garden pest of all, the white-tailed deer. The deer will drop by, seemingly at random, to sample what is on the menu. They can eat off the tops of a row of bean or tomato plants as effectively as a weed-whacker can trim the hedges. I particularly like their brazen attitude when confronted in the act. They look up leisurely as though to chastise me for disturbing their gourmet meal. After I have waved my arms, stomped my feet, shouted and barked like a dog, the deer will finally slowly leave the premise with great disdain for my performance. I think they leave more out of embarrassment for me than out of fear.
We cannot neglect the aggressive inhabitants of the garden. There is the young rogue squirrel who rushed up to me and barked like crazy in my face until its mother came along and scolded him into returning to the safety of the trees. The daddy-long-leg spiders live in the bean plants and the lettuce rows and will give me a nasty little spider bite when my hand gets too close. Big noisy slow bumble bees dive-bomb me on a regular basis when I am close to their flowers, but they are satisfied with just bouncing off of my body without harming me. And on a rainy year like this one, hordes of mosquitoes patrol the yard looking for fresh blood.
You may ask what this has to do with over-personalizing, which is after all the title of this post. It is a common error to attribute intent to events that actually do not have anything to do with us at all. Over-personalizing causes unnecessary distress, because we take on responsibility and blame ourselves for unrelated events. If someone does not call back right away, it may be they are just busy and not that they are upset with you. If a co-worker is snippy today, maybe she just had a fight with her husband this morning and it’s not about her feeling that you are not carrying a fair workload. I often work on these issues with people in psychotherapy. It is interesting to explore the origins of this pattern in their life history and it is very helpful when they are able to recognize and redirect their thinking so they do not end up feeling worse for no reason. People can change their “thought habits” and improve their sense of well-being and comfort in their daily lives.
You can see in my description of the trials and tribulations of a gardener many hints of over-personalization, albeit on a trivial and comic level. Let me close with this morning’s example. I found in the middle of my deck this morning one of my prized heirloom tomatoes with one dainty little bite taken out of it. I have been checking these tomatoes twice a day waiting for the first ripe one of the season and here it was on my deck. It seemed for an instant that the possum or raccoon or whatever had deliberately left it there unfinished but ruined to taunt me. Now that is some out-of-control over-personalization. I dismissed this absurd thought, threw the tomato remains into the compost pile and sighed. The life of a gardener is not easy, but there are other tomatoes on the vine. Plenty to share.
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