Avoid Self-Branding

A few months back, shortly after I started messing around with Facebook, I connected with an acquaintance from elementary school. In an email to him, I essentially apologized for being a bully when I was in elementary school. When I was in elementary school, I have it seared in my brain that I was a bad kid because I took care of my problems with my fists. If someone made fun of me too much, I hit him. Well, his reply hit me like a ton of bricks. He said, “That’s strange, I don’t remember you that way at all. I remember you being one of the nicest guys in our class.”

I say it hit me like a ton of bricks because I was floored. I’d always had this image of myself as being a problem child who solved his problems in a negative way. But here was someone telling me that they didn’t remember me that way at all. To understand the impact of a comment like this, you have to allow yourself to get inside of my head. I have a hearing loss, which most of the other students did not know about. But I knew about it. I didn’t want anyone else to know about it, so I worked very hard to hide the fact that I wore a hearing aid. As such, I think I was much more sensitive than I needed to be. If someone made fun of the way I talked or acted, or just plain angered me, I recall making certain that in no uncertain terms was it okay for them to make fun of me. If they did, there were going to be consequences. This was especially true if I knew the other person was physically weaker than me.

But he didn’t just say that I was “nice.” He said I was “one of the nicest guys in our class.” This just didn’t mesh with the Dave Hatton that I thought I knew.

Fast-forward to last week when I was sharing my New Year’s Resolution with a friend of mine in my A Course In Miracles study group. As some of you may recall from an earlier post (I Release, I Let Go…), I stated that one of my resolutions was to release my “quickness to anger.” After the meeting, my friend, Mark, said, “I hope you will not be too hard on yourself if you do find yourself to be ‘quick to anger’ at some point in the future.” He continued, “You don’t want to be so aware of it that when you do it, you just get angry with yourself. It is almost as if you would be branding yourself on the back.” To emphasize his point, he made a motion of stabbing a branding iron on his own back.

The moment he said that, I was reminded of the email conversation I’d had with my elementary school acquaintance about me (not) being a bully. I shared that story with him, and he smiled broadly and nodded his head. He could see that I understood what he meant.

We are not born in original sin. We may feel as though we are as we go through our formative years. But we are truly born in original innocence. We have just forgotten that. When we begin to remember who we really are, we begin to realize that there is nothing that we really need to fix, we just need to be who we really are.

Though this is something we can do ourselves through study of A Course In Miracles, I’ve been fortunate to have a couple of friends guide me back in that direction. Thanks!

You might ask yourself if it is possible that others don’t see you the same way you see yourself. When you really think about it, we spend a whole lot more time thinking about how we look to others than others think about how we look to them. Avoid branding yourself as something worse than you really are. I have realized that most people do not see me as the person who is quick to anger, because I mostly keep it to myself. Is it really necessary for me to give them something else to keep an eye out for? Remember, you are as God created you. It is easy for us to forget that when we are so much more aware of the negative that surrounds us. Surround yourself with peace, and you will slowly remember who you really are.
Namaste