Seeking Validation: A Cacodemon in Plain Sight?

Have you ever just sat by yourself in a classroom that has somehow found its way into transforming into a hive of activity diffused with indecipherable emotions: from pride to disappointment and from excitement to numbness??

Speaking of emotions, let's get back to looking at you again: so have you just sat there all by yourself looking at some random test paper of yours which you have just been handed over contemplating about a score which you didn’t think was good enough and a classmate of yours just decides to pop by and say, “Hey, that ain’t too bad.” And all of a sudden that feeling of not securing a good enough score has vanished in thin air; now you feel like you did just fine and can move on with your day without having to over-scrutinizing your capabilities.?

Lets try and understand what just happened here: you might think of it as a normal exchange of words which leaves you feeling better about yourself so why try to analyze it in the first place?

Well, now let's try to turn things around in the same scenario: What if you thought you did pretty well and that classmate of yours seems to think that you were absolutely terrible in that test and now you are stuck in a loop of feeling lost and incompetent. Why?

Because in both of these scenarios, you hand over the power to decide how you feel about something to another person and this person in your life can be absolutely anyone: maybe a friend, family member, partner, or even a person you just saw walking across the street.?

Inviting another person to walk in on you experiencing a feeling and telling you how you are supposed to feel is simply and explicitly one of the worst things you can do to yourself.?

A couple weeks ago, I was just meeting a friend over coffee when he told me that he got rejected from his dream school. For a moment, there was impenetrable silence in that coffee house despite dozens of people sitting around us chit chatting; there was this silence and in that very silence I was just thinking to myself, “He doesn’t look upset enough though” and just the next minute I realized how inconsiderate that was for someone like me who talks a lot about validating how one feels. Who am I to decide how upset he should be over not getting into his dream school, or if he should be upset at all. Why was I even expecting for him to seek my validation or trying to influence how bad he should be feeling??

Seeking Validation is not that new of a concept for us, we seek validation every now and then- we wait for others to tell us that our outfit looks stellar, we wait for others to tell us that we are just on the right path of our lives, we wait for others to tell us that we’ll be okay, but the worst of it that we wait on others to let us know who we are supposed to be.?

There’s a fine line between having to seek someone’s advice and seeking their validation in order to decide how you should feel about certain things. There are certainly going to be times when you are going to need that best friend of yours to sit with you as you cry your heart out and tell you that you’re going to be okay but you don’t need to seek everyone’s validation at every point of time. Rather, start validating how you feel, start validating who you are, and start validating who you want to be tomorrow!

Is it going to be a cakewalk??

Probably not, but how about starting today and validating that you felt insanely amazing after eating that scoop of ice cream in ice cold weather without having to think about how everyone else would call you crazy for doing so.?

It's just an instance people, please don’t fall sick on this article’s account:)

Just going to put myself out there and ask you again, how about we start today with a miniscule step and feel proud of ourselves every single time we validate how we feel and refuse to let our emotions be influenced by anyone’s opinion?