Schadenfreude yourself

I learned to control my emotions at a young age. I wish others could do the same. My father was killed in a car accident when I was nine years old. It left me feeling angry, ferociously angry, headache-inducing angry, grind-your teeth angry. I would stop being angry long enough for my older brother's joke to change my mood into giddy laughter. Voila, I learned that altering my mood was as simple as changing my focus.

I could choose to be in any mood that I wanted, it was completely up to me. Well, I have to tell you that this discovery was like a super power. In grade school, I could be silly and funny, yet when called on to march up to the board I was completely focused. It was a prayer come true for the nun that called me up to the chalkboard.

As a young adult, I befriended one of my college teachers. He also suffered the death of his father at a young age. He had been in therapy for years trying to put together the pieces of his life after his fireman father disappeared from the roof of a burning building. It was an incredible idea to him that you could be alive one moment and engulfed in flames in the next. I spoke to him about my job.

"I was waiting for the bus to go to work," I told him, "and I started rubbing top of my spine at the base of my brain. It was a pain that radiated across my shoulders." As I told him the story, I rolled my neck left and right until I heard a loud "crack" releasing the remembered tension.

"As soon as I made the decision to give my notice" I smiled at him, "the pain was gone. Poof. Relieved. It was instantaneous" I said.

He laughed, "do you know how much it would cost me in therapy sessions to relieve that kind of pain?"

"Just crack your neck and make the hard decisions," I said.

Years later, I started working in high-stress jobs that paid me too well to quit. I used the tools in my emotional kit and decided that jobs should pay for me to live well, they shouldn't reduce the value of my life. I was back to imagining a good life - to create a good life.

At one job a coworker told me that I had a "happy, smiling face." At another job, my lunch group was called "the happies." At another job, I worked with someone who cried about newspaper headlines, cried because the light was shining too harshly on her desk, cried because her blouse was too tight. I returned to work after a death in my family and she said some harsh words to me that made me cry. When she left my cubicle her parting words were "now you know what it's like to cry at work." As if I needed the lesson in crying. Some people need a lesson in choosing not to cry, or at least not enjoying the pain of others.