The urgency I felt was palpable. So what if my back was screaming at me. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make. The safety of my family was hanging in the balance!
Noticing the time, I cursed. Arg! Where did the time go? My quest for a perfect sunscreen would end in vain.
At this point, it would have been helpful to tap into some self-awareness (and self-compassion) and recognize the deeper root of my obsession. Alas, this was not to be so. Instead, I spent the next four days continuing my quest, putting hours into my online search.
This ill-fated journey down the sunscreen rabbit hole was a quintessential example of my lack of self-awareness. I couldn’t be bothered to tune in to my mind and body. Time was of the essence! The sun was coming!
I twisted the messages my mind and body were shouting at me, and as a result, I attempted to fix something that wasn’t broken.
My family wasn’t in danger. Sunscreen of any kind is better than none. Sunscreen that can be purchased in my community? Even better.
In truth, my sense of urgency over sunscreen was a misguided attempt to gain control over my life. At best, it was a waste of time. At worst, it was a distraction from deeper issues.
When life feels out of control, it’s easy to self-soothe with an unrelated problem. Our efforts to solve this puzzle make us feel like we’re back in the driver’s seat. What’s wrong with that? Well, for starters, we’re driving in the opposite direction.
Tapping into our self-awareness doesn’t just have the potential to save us time and energy. It can also alleviate many of our day-to-day discomforts before they take hold of our attention.
Sunscreen is sunscreen. At the end of the day, whether I slather my kids with mineral or chemical, Neutrogena or Alba, doesn’t really matter. So long as there’s some barrier between them and that big ball of gas in the sky, we’re good.
So what was going on in my head? Great question!
As an anxious, introverted empath, solitude is food for my soul. It’s not just a nice thing to have. It’s a daily necessity. The ten days of my harrowing sunscreen adventure (yes, ten freaking wasted days) were generated by my utter lack of solitude and the fact that I had no control over those circumstances.
I was trying to control my access to solitude by identifying the best sunscreen on Earth! Talk about a misguided attempt to regain control. 😝
I’ll be honest, my inner toddler was having a tantrum. She was tired of people being in her space 24/7, and in an effort to self-soothe, she created a problem she thought she could control.
This realization made me laugh.
It can be so easy to believe that this pain, this challenge, and this discomfort will last forever. That if we don’t fix it right now it will plague us for the rest of our lives. In truth, nothing lasts forever. That’s the power of self-awareness! When we recognize what’s happening within, we can stop trying to unclog the toilet by putting on lipstick, freeing up our attention to attend to the real issue at hand.
Sure, it’s best to get to this point before you’ve waste days of your life researching sunscreen like I did, but hey… better late than never! That’s the other cool thing about putting our attention into developing self-awareness — self-compassion builds in tandem.
The road towards self-awareness isn’t easy, but it’s totally worth it. When we can look back at how far we’ve come, we realize that our previous attempts to feel in control were not only futile and rigid, they were in direct opposition to genuine control.
No, the irony is not lost on me. To feel more control over our lives, we must acknowledge how little control we have. I guess you can chalk it up to being one of those great mysteries of life. Maybe the why in this situation doesn’t real matter. Instead, perhaps we should just be grateful that someone, somewhere along the way, figured it out and shared their lesson with us.
To surrender control can be scary. But it’s also liberating. And isn’t that something we all want? Freedom from fear and worry, from the feeling that we’re not good enough or must prove ourselves somehow. Sunscreen may do a great job protecting my family from ultraviolet rays, but self-awareness protects me from myself.
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