How to Deal with Criticism

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things. If it is heeded in time, danger may be averted; if it is suppressed, a fatal distemper may develop."
- Winston Churchill
--------------------------------------------
People get criticized on the daily.
It may be from family, friends, bosses, piers, or total strangers. The number of times some stranger has told me what I should do with my life is staggering. Either way it happens. It can really break a person down depending on how it's given and received. I'm going to go ahead and give a disclaimer that this is not going to be a post about toughening up or something along those lines. As the kids would say this is a post about "dealing with the haters."
I was raised as an independent child. that doesn't mean my parents weren't around, it means they taught us how to do things for ourselves. Not only did that mean I knew how to laundry by the age of 7, it also meant I knew how to and had no fear of straying from the given path. Two weeks into being 18 I had two tattoos. I dyed my hair green. I dyed it back, then got dreadlocks. I traveled across the country alone and spent the nights with people I met on the internet. I decided to take a semester off and go to a college on an island.
Every decision was criticized and hated by at least one person. I have literally set myself up to be attacked by the human opinion. The things I stand for and the way I live my life somehow bother people I've never met and even close family and friends.
Dealing with the backlash of anything isn't as easy as ignoring it. I mean sure I have that hard of hearing advantage so sometimes I literally can't hear it, but you get the point. Sure you can pretend like you don't care; put up a persona of chill and sassy but when you have a bad day chances are good your mind will wander back to the comment and use it to tear you down. So what I want you to try to do is take any criticism you receive and twist it into a compliment.
Human: "that tattoo is forever you know, I cant believe you actually defiled your body just because that was a little important to you."
Me: "i cant believe I got this tattoo after years and years of planning and I get to have it on my body until I die. it's what I've wanted for so long and it means so much to me."
Kind of like that if that makes any sense.
You are loved by someone, I promise, so if some rude punk tells you that your life is gunna end you up in a garbage can than just remember my senior quote, "whenever you feel like trash just remember: it's called a trash CAN not a trash CAN'T."
Truly,
Abby

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=BBMQ7XEP6MV6W

Comments

  1. PaulSeptember 25, 2016 at 1:29 PM

    That was so serious and then I laughed out loud at your senior quote!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

what happens when the fight doesn't stop

Image
everyone knows that when people talk about "the fight" it's usually in reference to some sort of long or short-term battle. that battle could be any number of things, the flu, cancer, a breakup, a surgery, a tumor, you get the idea. this "fight" is something an individual goes through knowing that they will (hopefully) come out the other end of. they will beat it, win the fight, and move on. but what happens when the fight doesn't stop? it's so hard to put into words what a chronic illness is like which makes it even harder to explain to people who have never heard of such things especially since i tend to be rather jovial when explaining what my chronic illnesses are and what they do to me. my desire to make sure people aren't uncomfortable ends up masking how serious these illnesses are and therefore give those people an inaccurate idea of what i'm going through. so, let me lay it out for you plain and simple. i have a degenerative c
Keep reading

Diff-Abled

Image
“I choose not to place "DIS", in my ability.” ― Robert M. Hensel ----------- Do you know how strange it is to technically be disabled by the age of 18?   I have no idea how many of you are familiar with my story. I had chronic migraines for almost three years. I should probably say migraine. One word. I had one migraine for almost a year; it put me in and out of the hospital and I missed almost two full months of school. It was all over the place and never really diagnosed, to be honest half of the doctors thought I was lying. I had MRI's, X-rays, Ultra sounds and am now a pro at ER etiquette. When you're a sick child/teenager with an illness that isn't terminal most of the time you just get left out. I'm not saying the doctors don't try, but you become graffiti in their life. Your symptoms fill a room that is supposed to turn into a beautiful painting of your condition, but more often than not it becomes a mess of pictures,
Keep reading

Are You Happy?

Image
"On a scale of 1-0 are you happy?" - Bo Burnham --------------------------------------------------------- Happiness is one of those terms that doesn't really having a true meaning. People have depression, people have other mental conditions, people have good days and bad days. Happiness is a relative term. Something closer to euphoric (I've been pretty partial to that word lately) and cheery would be better. That being said I'm going to talk about being happy anyway and use that word regardless. I just wanted to clear things up with the word and the connotations that follow it. Happiness, my dear friends, is quite a lovely thing because you can posses it even if you're having a crummy day. I meet new people every day and always get the question "how are you." It's common courtesy to ask that, but instead of answering with "good" or "fine," I've been answering with "happy." I am in a rut. I
Keep reading