No, Don’t Let Anybody Else Take Your Own Responsibility
A thin line between taking responsibility, gratefulness, and indebtedness — where do we draw the line?
There are a plethora of reasons why you must take responsibility for yourself. This is not the trite that connotes taking responsibility for your actions only. But the one that inherently and literally highlights taking responsibility for your only life, taking charge of your life.
When you refuse to or pass on the responsibility involving your life and livelihood over to someone else, something really unsettling will keep happening to you. That feeling is called excess gratitude, which equates to indebtedness. When you are indebted to someone, it’s usually because you owe them “your life” figuratively. Mostly over some huge favor they might have done for you. It could be paying your child’s hospital bills last minute when you lost all hopes. Or it could be saving you from a ghastly motor accident when they detected your driving mistake. Anything of sort. These types of favors are hard to come by and stand the test of time. And hence why it’s called indebtedness.
But I believe that what you really want to express from time to time is gratitude and sparingly, indebtedness. But you can’t do so when you keep letting people save you all the time or offer your life on a platter for them to take care of.
Such refusals include provisional favors such as feeding you, clothing you, a roof over your head. It gets deeper when you also expect them to come through for you even emotionally, psychologically, mentally, inclusive of the financial help.
The only people allowed to unequivocally provide all these for us are our parents or caregivers. Of which at some point, these expectations, sadly or not, reduce. But other than that, we’re meant to take care of ourselves by ourselves. There should be a limit to what we expect others to do for us.
Just because you have a spouse or other significant other who’s in love with you and will cater for all your needs, doesn’t mean you resign to it. Or you give up the little things that you can do for yourself. It doesn’t also equate to you giving up your rights as a single individual who came into this world alone. This is applicable to your best friend or loved ones.
Odds are, now you’re a big girl or a big boy in your own way — man or woman, lady or mister — whichever pronoun fits you. Get your acts right and realize that there’s no free lunch anywhere. Like one of my favorite authors on medium.com once said, “even the free lunch was paid by someone else”. Stop giving in to Martyr syndrome and playing a script that’ll keep rubbing you of your peace of mind through indebtedness.
Basically, I’m saying grow up.
Discipline yourself to take responsibility for your life and living as well. Eat well, sleep well, cook, clean, work, make money, keep striving. Stop depending on others to “come through” all the time.
No one can do a better job of taking care of you more than you.
Refuse incessant indebtedness and instead, choose gratitude. That way, you’re sure you got what you worked for or didn’t expect respectively. Stop bugging other people with your needs as everyone has got their cross to bear. Look out for ways to help yourself out and only ask for help when it gets really tough and impossible. Not the other way round which is when you seek help first before trying. Honestly, life doesn’t work that way.
It’s the reason why CVs don’t affect most companies now. Because they will be quick to tell you than anyone can and will never sell themselves short anyway when they are in need of a job. But once tested, they fail woefully. Consider doing well than doing your best. You can seek help over something, but at least start something up first. Another instance, you can’t seek assistance from a bestselling author with your writing aspirations when you haven’t even ever tried writing any piece on your own. Then how would they know where to help you from or how good or bad you are?
What am I trying to say?
There’s nothing wrong with being indebted to someone over a huge favor or life-saving encounter. However, the same manner at which we need to economize our anger for better things also relates to the “quantity” of expressing indebtedness. There’s no use being oblivious to when we should draw the line between indebtedness (excess gratitude) and when we should simply be grateful. Especially when the help we sought after came in-between or at the end of our hustles.
You would appreciate success more this way.
