Concepts Like Approval and Rejection

Unhealthy Lessons

At some stage, we started learning about concepts like approval and rejection. For our own good, of course. We learned about winning and losing. Smart and stupid. Success and failure. Pretty and ugly. We learned that our face could open doors. Or close them. We learned that our singing and dancing could be judged. Scored. Until then, we didn’t know that our paintings could be good or bad. It had never occurred to us and we simply didn’t think in those terms. We painted because we loved to paint. There was joy in what we did. We didn’t compare our masterpiece with anyone else’s art. In fact, we didn’t know what a comparison was.

We had to learn that too.

Somewhere along the way, we developed a new skill: worrying.

We learned to worry about how we looked. What we wore. Our hair. What people thought. Somehow, we learned that we needed the approval of others. We came to understand that our singing, dancing and painting might actually be terrible. Over night, the instinctive, the innocent and the joyful was replaced with the calculated, the insecure and the anxious.