The Moment You Stop Blaming Yourself
There was a famous line in the movie, “Good Will Hunting”, “it’s not your fault”. It was spoken by Sean Mcguire, a psychologist, played by Robin Williams, to Will Hunting, portrayed by Matt Damon. Hunting is a janitor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who has a gift for mathematics. Owing to his deprived childhood, he builds a high wall to protect his ego with a victim mentality. In order to keep himself out of jail, he reluctantly agrees to see a psychologist, Mcguire, who tries to heal the deep scars inside Will’s mind so as to learn a healthy love.
Many of us try to live by our own rule of justice. Quite often, it is not compatible with conventional reality and we suffer from the hurt caused by the difference. Some are able to find their own way of living by compromising with reality, others not. Some are capable enough to win in the battle of life and achieve their goals. But many just keep struggling and hoping to find a way not to be hurt too much. And they hope people will recognize them someday.
In the course of our life, many try not to be persuaded by reality even though there is a sacrifice. But we all know how hurtful it is to stay unspoiled as we age.
I often tell the people I sit with, “It is not your fault”. And the healing power of this sentence is beyond expectation.
I say this not to mimic Mcguire, rather it is simply the truest thing I know to offer someone standing in absolute hopelessness, once you have spent enough time listening to how their life actually unfolded.
For many of us, our lives aren’t laid out as we would wish or as we try. We were educated by Edison’s famous aphorism, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration”. But if you age enough to learn life, you would understand this doesn’t apply to everybody. If you are able to achieve something by 99 percent perspiration, you deserve your success and you are lucky. Yet I cannot deny the fact that some people are still fumbling around in the darkness of helplessness.
Healing is not only meant for those who feel they have failed in life. I once talked at length with a quietly influential public figure — someone many people already looked up to — and as he told me his story, I could see the long and winding road he had walked to get where he was. I told him that everything he’d built, he’d built with his own hands, through real hardship, without much support from anyone, starting from nothing. He winced, as if it hurt to hear it named so plainly, but something like peace settled over his face.
He grew up in an orphanage as his parents couldn’t afford to raise him. His current success was not only made through his effort but was built on all the hardships he had to endure on the way. He appreciated that he heard what he wanted to hear. He had to appear strong and nowhere could he confess his past.
This is a rather happy ending to a story of a life.
Here is the story of an ordinary man.
He came from a poor family. His father had been jailed as he was not able to pay back his debts. Since his mother became the breadwinner, he, the oldest son in the family had to assist his mother while the other siblings were raised by his uncle. He got a job at a bank after graduation but he still had to fight with debt and his personality was not lithe enough to fit in a company and its regulation. He resigned because he couldn’t compromise himself with the reality and left for a trip without enough money. Experiencing all these hardships, he questioned his life. He felt he had no luck. All these questions about life eventually led him to devote himself to the very thing that had once felt unbearable — sitting with people in their hardest moments and helping them make sense of what they were going through.
In that work, he also comforts people who are in trouble, saying “It’s not your fault”. Because he learned that there is no shortcut through pain — only the slow work of tending to the hurt while people make their way through the darkest tunnel of their lives.
Looking back, he could see a clear shape to it: the hardest years fell early, and no effort on his part could have pulled him out of that tunnel any sooner. What looked, for decades, like promise that never arrived was really just timing — the pieces of his life were aligned to come together in his mid-forties, not before. Once he understood that, he stopped struggling against the wait and complaining about his circumstances, and let the years do what they were always going to do.