Tough luck: accepting life’s unfairness will set you free | Holly Matthews | TEDxNewcastleCollege

How many people here have already experienced some pain or suffering today? I would think you have something. We already have some hands raised. How do you think about your journey to get here today? You woke up this morning, maybe you had to crawl. For your trust, it was definitely me this morning, maybe you got in your car and experienced some road rage because some idiot jumped a little further. I'll cut you off because that happened to me last week and it was really hard. like someone was stuck in traffic on the way here today because there's nothing like the frustration of being stuck on a bumper in rush hour traffic to get your blood pumping.

Has anyone been offended today? Has anyone felt offended or had their feelings hurt? We do. Our feelings have definitely been hurt, we are sensitive and really, at some point today, you have found yourself browsing social networks and you have felt that pang of envy when comparing your

life

with the perfect

life

of a boy or girl on Instagram, We do that too, right? horrible I imagine that everyone in this room has experienced some big or small feelings of pain or discomfort and I know that some of you in this room have already been through some really difficult things, in fact I'm sure there are many of you sitting here today that you are in the midst of great challenges in your life and if you have gone through life up to this point unscathed by some miracle then I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news but you are going to go through something horrible too and what a nice way to start a chat TED.

In fact, I think there is something positive in this knowledge because if you can accept that pain and suffering are part of our human experience, that it is something that connects us all, none of us are immune then you can start to build a truly amazing life. no matter all the challenges you know you are going to face and that is powerful when I was pregnant for the first time with my daughter Brooke I did what I imagine Many pregnant women do and I began to imagine what it would be like to experience childbirth and based on my knowledge about childbirth in what I had witnessed on hospital television dramas, I was under the impression that I was about to experience constant agonizing pain and now it hurt.

I'm not disappointed, it hurts a little, but the reality for the most part is that we go through contractions, so we

will

have one painful contraction and then we

will

have a moment right after and then we will have another painful contraction and then a moment to recover. breath, now our lives work the same way, then something difficult will happen to us, the breakup of a relationship, the loss of a job, and then we have an in-between moment and then comes another painful moment, the death of someone we love a trauma a failure and then a moment of downtime now in order for us to lead a happy and fulfilling life we ​​need to start recognizing when we are in our in-between moments and sometimes they are short sometimes they feel like they are really brief so we have to be alert and aware so that When we are in our in-between moments we can fill them with love, light and great experiences.

Now, some people, when they go through a difficult time, can find themselves labeled. and then maybe behave like a victim of those circumstances and the word victim seems really disempowering to me and when you start behaving like a victim all you do is prolong your pain and suffering and you stay stuck now there are some people who feel that a victim constantly that life really hurts, you know those are the people that someone will order a round of coffee at work and accidentally miss the order, well it's the end of the world right? and they will feel harassed, attacked, victimized, they will lose a parking space in the parking lot, someone else if they are really annoying in front of them, they will have to close the parking lot but for them the universe is against them, right?

It starts to rain and these people will feel like it's raining deliberately just to annoy them and then life will throw something really difficult at them and it's just the icing on the cake for them and they'll be constantly moaning and complaining and then on the other hand. We know those people who really seem to have been dealt a harsh hand and yet seem to move quickly through life from one problem to another smiling, grateful, laughing despite everything, the whole difference between those who play the victims and the that is not the responsibility they take for their own lives and their own happiness mr. and the lady victim, they were her problems like a badge of honor, it's her excuse, it's her reason, it's her opportunity to simply opt out, take her hands off the wheel and walk away.

I did not do anything. That is not me. I didn't do anything and I could have It seems like a nice thing because it's good not to be responsible, it's good when it's not our fault, but the downside of this behavior is that if you behave like this you will never be really happy, you will never feel really satisfied and your glasses victim son was going to make the world a really difficult place at 32 she was married and had two children, Brooke, who was six at the time, and Texas, who was four. She had a house, a car and money in the bank.

I had been a TV actress for most of my life, which meant I had some really interesting experiences in May 2017. I was in Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean islands, a really beautiful part of the world and a friend of ours invited us there, there is a family who had given us access to this luxurious apartment on a golf course and we had just spent ten days under the glorious Caribbean sun and if you had scribbled through my Instagram account at the time you would have seen a woman and a family with a great life and lots of exciting things.

The future stretched out in front of them two months later and my husband Ross had died in the weeks before his death. He was in a hospice bed. I could hear the nurses chatting in the hallway and that familiar sound of machines beeping that anyone who'd been around sick people who recognized that it was 1:00 a. m. and I was googling the stages of death because lying next to me in a double bed was my husband Ross and I was struggling to fall asleep because I was listening to him breathing. And wondering what breath would be his last now, after my Google search, I realized that I probably had a few more days with him, so I used that time wisely and decided that I knew I couldn't change what was going on and that to try to fight against it.

It was going to prolong the pain and suffering, so I decided to practice acceptance, acceptance that my husband was going to die, acceptance that my life was going to change. I looked around for the pain and took back my power. Ross had been diagnosed with brain cancer in February 2014 and he was bad from the start. I appreciate that it is rare, a PN 80 tumor that is normally found in children and that is usually found in the back of the head, his was in the front and he had a 50 to 50 chance of survival in five years and when We went to that first meeting. with oncologist dr.

Spooner, an absolutely empathetic man who wore strange socks, carried the most battered and bruised briefcase you have ever seen and, to my husband's horror, always read paper by paper At that first meeting, my husband asked why I have a childhood brain tumor . Why is it in the front of my head when it's normally in the back and that kind doctor looked my husband in the eyes, leaned forward and said, I don't know why you have brain cancer? The answer was refreshingly honest. We spend our time. lives searching for meaning trying to make sense of everything sometimes torturing ourselves by the apparent injustice of a situation why we will always say why always the good but unfortunately that is not true it is not only the good who go through difficult times, it is all Many of We psychologists call this the myth of the just world: if I am good, good things will happen to me and we all know this is not true.

We can do the best we can and still feel that we can love with the purest love and we can still have love. our broken hearts professor Leon f seltzer calls these our findings simply by being alive that no matter how good we are we cannot escape the inevitable truth that injustice will continue to occur after Ross's diagnosis and the first brain of consciousness, so I found myself alone Maybe for the first time since the diagnosis and I walked into my house and looked at it like I was a stranger. I saw her for the first time.

Pictures on the wall. The pulse left on the table. Everything just frozen in a time before Ross had cancer. I sat on the floor and really cried, I cried the kind of crying where you think you'll never stop, but in that moment I had more clarity than I had ever had in my entire life because in that moment I realized that no one was going to stop. fix this for me and if I wanted to have a happy life despite all the challenges then it was up to me so I got up off the floor and put a bunch of eye makeup on and decided to go for it. whatever it takes to help me and my family get through this time in our lives when I talk to mentally strong people there is common ground in how they deal with life they don't feel sorry for themselves they aren't ashamed to cry and be vulnerable where necessary , they don't feel like the world owes them anything and are willing to be adaptable.

Ross's death was and is one of the most painful things in my life and people often find it difficult to understand how I can stay here and talk. so openly about my pain and loss, they may also find it difficult to understand how I can move on or why I don't fit the stereotype of a widow, but I think we are taught a very skewed idea of ​​justice from a young age. and we just won't let it go until adulthood and while we focus on some injustice that we feel we have or are going through, we are completely trapped in this pain and in order for us to detach ourselves there has to be a Level of acceptance and responsibility that comes into play.

I mean, what if the world was truly fair for everyone? If you and I could create this wild utopia where everyone got everything they wanted, what would that really look like? Maybe only evil people would get it. sick ok we would all be beautiful just totally subjective and everyone would always win meaning none of us actually won. This crazy world of justice is not only implausible but the idea that it should or could ever happen prevents us from living in our right now and that doesn't mean not fighting for equality and confronting injustice, but it does mean that on a very personal and if you want to be happy then you have to learn to accept that there are some parts of your life that are just going to be unfair and there are big parts of your life that you have no control over, so let's think about your life for a moment.

Everyone has something. They will have something painful. What would happen if they let go of the expectation of justice? As? Could you answer differently? How might that affect your emotions or your experience of the world? Maybe instead of feeling normal, you would start looking for lessons from what you are going through and feel truly grateful for the good things in your life. From focusing on the things you don't want, you would start focusing on the things you do want, the things you can control, not the things you can't, I'm grateful for my husband's death, not at all, I wish he was here more than nothing.

But I can't change the fact that he's dead. I can only change my response to this and when we stop banging our heads against the wall and screaming about how unfair the world is, then we can truly live and recognize that we may not be able to. control any of those external things, but you can control the internal things very well, so when life gets difficult, that will stop, make you have cried, have your moment and then get up and make a new plan. Sheryl Sandberg wrote a book called Option B after her husband's sudden death that focuses on when your Plan A will be taken away from you, what your Option B will be, and most of us get so caught up in what our lives should be like that we can actually We become quite inflexible and rigid, so when we are forced to our plan B, there can be

free

dom in this.

When Ross died, I realized that I didn't really understand the world much because the world I knew my plan in definitely had Ross alive in it, so when Plan B was my reality, I just had to stay open to what I would come later and listen to the lessons they were teaching me because life really is just a series of moments, lessons and experiences, and we just have to absorb those moments of joy with the people we love as long as we have them and stop holding on to things to hold on. to them,

free

yourself from the burden of everything turning out exactly the way you think it should, because even with the best planning and execution in the world you probably won't free yourself from the expectation of expecting justice and a level playing field because it will never happen, there will always be someone who will You will see better at your job and that you will live a long, happy and healthy life with the person you love,a supportive family, money in the bank, so what are they?

What are you going to do about it because you don't have bad

luck

, it doesn't come in threes and it's not just about being kind to yourselves, forgiving yourselves and it's not all about doing well and recognizing that being resilient to difficult things is not It's about how much you can handle, it's about resting, recovering, and fully living your in-between moments. Thank you very much.