What Did I Do?

What did I do? Is this a rhetorical question or a question of introspection? We usually tend to examine the situation and others when this question is raised in our mind. Its never answered with self-realization of our feelings and emotions. When we say this out loud, we usually expect an answer: “nothing” or when we think about it we keep saying this to ourselves: “I did nothing wrong” or “I did not do anything”. But still this question keeps showing up from time to time and never finds its answer. The main question here is, do we really want to know the answer or are we only waiting for a validation to feel good about ourselves?

Most of our actions are directed through a moral compass and hence we always feel right about our actions. Unfortunately, moral compass is not a simple device where north, south, east and west will always remain in the same direction, no matter who holds the direction. Our morality is subjected to our beliefs and values along with multitude of factors involving our age, gender, environment, financial status, social presence etc. Hence when we question this out loud, we associate a tone which makes it a rhetorical question.

Long ago, I was travelling to my hometown with my parents and a couple who were our friends in a car. My father was driving. After a distance a jeep with some young friends who seemed to be on a joyous vacation tried to overtake us. My dad being a careful driver, allowed them to get passed us. But out of no where another car came from another direction and to avoid a head on collision, the jeep banged our car, crashing into the driver’s door and shattering the window glass. Jeep did save everyone but we had to pay the price for someone else’s life and may be for someone else’s fault too. When everything is tangible, we analyse our actions and think: I wish I was a bit faster or I never allowed him to get past me and so many what ifs and why did this happen to me and what did I do to go through this. When everyone is physically safe, there is a sigh of relief before all our what ifs. We always remember such incidents and in future our actions are careful and cautious. My principal once told: “accidents happen only once. What if you are not there to witness the next. So always learn your lesson when you are given the opportunity.”

What about emotional accidents? Do we learn our lessons as easily as we analysed this physical one or do we keep committing the same accident again and again? Can you give this a thought or do we even know what are emotional accidents? Let me give some examples: Imagine a stressful day at office, you are helpless there to say anything inorder to maintain the harmony of the place. But you come home and have a fight with your spouse. When parents have an argument, the anger spills on the child because sometimes you can’t express everything to each other; If you are upset that your kid might be in a wrong company, you tend to scold your child rather than making them understand what you see inappropriate in the other person. In all these examples, the person who gets damaged, like my father’s car, will be thinking what did I do? While the jeep driver who is you was just trying to save someone else from a major damage. Since this is not tangible to all 3 parties, everyone will be wondering with the same question: what did I do? This results in emotional accident.

Do we learn from this anytime in life? No. We miss to analyse because we fail to communicate the reason and explain ourselves. After our car accident, we still drove to our destination. There was heavy rain on the way and since the driver seat window glass was shattered, my dad was getting wet throughout the way. Since rainwater splashes in an angle, me who was sitting behind the driver seat was completely drenched. No one knew about this because my seat door had its window closed and since this was our first experience, we did not know how back seat gets impacted more than the front seat.

Similar situation we see in our kids or even adults who are damaged due to such emotional accidents where they don’t know what they did wrong to deserve the pain which resulted due to someone else’s outburst. I was a 10year old kid at that time who knew the situation but did not know that I should tell the adults, I was getting drenched because that tiny mind only thought whoever sits there will be wet and there is no solution. But later when they found out, they told we could have found a way to reduce the impact if I told them the problem. Since parents don’t share their problems with kids, kids learn to do the same. We grow up learning what we see and what fascinates us more than what we are taught.

Learn to make conversation rather than arguments.
Learn to share feelings rather than yelling them out.
Learn to listen rather than concluding the story.
Learn to express your emotions rather than hiding them to cause accidents.

Once raised as a rhetorical question, over a period of time it pulls you into a whirlpool of emotional turmoil in every accident of life. Slowly each accident will affect you like a sculptor’s hit on the rock which could turn you into a beautiful sculpture or could damage you permanently.

Reasoning behind every action and correction after every mistake is what makes communication in your relationship flow from argument to conversation.

What did I do, should not be asked for validation but it should be a question which helps you in the direction which your moral compass leads you to. When your values are not driven by someone else’s validation, your emotions find its way to be expressed in a graceful manner.

When I scold my child because I am tired at the end of the day, I fight with my spouse because I dislike the life choices I made, I am angry with my parents because I am unable to make them understand my situation, I am fighting with my sibling because I expected more from them, I am resenting my friendship because I did not get the support I wanted  – all these are situation which I go through where the other person is unaware of why I am behaving the way I do. When such interactions repeat in relationship, person on the receiving end is always wondering: “What did I do?” In reality we should be introspecting our own behavior to understand ourselves, so we get an answer for what did I do and why I did that. The interesting and yet disappointing reality is we try to understand everyone else in our world and expect others to understand us but we fail to do that with ourselves. “I am the stranger with whom I lived my entire life.” Ask yourself  “what did I do?” to get the answer from within and not validation from outside so you no longer remain that stranger in your own life.