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

how many people in here have already experienced some pain or suffering today I would think about your got something we've got some hands up already how are you think about your journey to get here today you woke up this morning maybe you had to drag yourself out of your confid that was definitely me this morning perhaps you jumped in your car and you experienced some road rage as some idiot and his jumped up little more I'll cut you up because that happened to me last week and it was really an iron as anybody's stuck in traffic on the way here today because there is nothing like the frustration of being bumper-to-bumper in rush-hour traffic to get your blood pumping has anybody been offended today has anyone been offended or had their feelings hurt we do definitely have our feelings hurt we're sensitive and really at any point today have you found yourself scrolling through social media and had that pang of envy as you compared your life to perfect Instagram boy or girls life we do that as well don't we horrible I imagine that everybody in this room has experienced some large or small feelings of pain or discomfort and I know that some of you in this room have already been through some really tough stuff in fact I'm sure that there are many of you sat here today that are slap-bang in the middle of huge challenges in your life and if you have breezed through life to this point unscathed by some miracle then I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but you're going to go through something awful as well and what a pleasant way to begin a TED talk I actually do 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 begin to build a really amazing life regardless of all the challenges that you know that you're going to face and that is powerful when I was pregnant for the first time with my daughter Brooke I did what I imagine a lot of expectant mothers do and I started to imagine what it might be like to experience childbirth and basing my knowledge of childbirth on what I had witnessed on Hospital TV dramas I was under the impression that I was about to experience constant agonizing pain now it hurt I'm not don't be disillusioned it's stung a bit but the reality the reality for the most part is that we go through contractions so will have a painful contraction and then we get a moment just after and then we get another painful contraction and then a moment to catch your breath now our lives work in much the same way so we'll have something tough happen the breakup of a relationship a job loss and then we get a moment in between and then in comes another painful bit the death of somebody that we love a trauma a failure and then a moment of downtime now in order for us to lead a happy and fulfilled life we need to start to recognize when we are in our in-between moments and sometimes they're short sometimes they feel really short so we have to become alert and mindful so that when we are in our in-between moments we can pack them full of love and light and great experiences now for some people when they go through a difficult time they can find themselves being labeled and then perhaps behaving like a victim of those circumstances and I find the word victim really disempowering and when you begin to behave like a victim all you are doing is prolonging your pain and suffering and you keeping yourself stuck now there are some people that feel like a victim constantly that life just really stings you know they're the people that someone will order a round of coffee at work and they'll get accidentally missed off the order well it's the end of the world isn't it and they will feel bullied attacked victimized they'll miss out on a car parking space in the car park someone else if in in front of them really annoying they'll have to lock the car park but to them the universe is against them isn't it it will start to rain and these people will feel like it's deliberately raining just to annoy them and then life will chuck them something really difficult and it is just the icing on the cake for them and they get to moan and groan and complain constantly then on the flipside we meet those people that really do seem to have been dealt a tough hand and yet they seem to breeze through life from problem to problem smiling grateful laughing through it all the difference between those that play victim and those that don't is the responsibility that they take for their own lives and their own happiness mr. and mrs. victim they were their troubles like a badge of honor it's their excuse it's their reason it's their chance to just opt out take their hands off the wheel and just go I didn't do anything That's not me I didn't do anything and there might seem something nice in that because it's nice not to be responsible it's nice when it's not our fault but the downside to this behavior is that if you behave like this you'll never truly be happy you will never truly feel satisfied and your victim glasses are going to make the world a really tough place to be at 32 I was married with two children Brooke who at the time was six and Texas who was four I had house a car and money in the bank I had been a TV actress for most of my life which meant that I had some really cool experiences in May 2017 I was in Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean islands really beautiful part of the world and we had been invited there is a family by a friend of ours who had given us access to this plush apartment on a golf course and we had just spent ten days in the glorious Caribbean sunshine and if you had scrawled down my Instagram feed at that time you would have seen a woman and a family with a great life and a whole heap of exciting future spread out in front of them fast forward two months and my husband Ross had died in the weeks leading up to his death I was in a hospice bed I could hear the nurses chatting in the corridor and that familiar sound of beeping machines that anybody who has been around sick people would recognize it was 1:00 a.m. and I was google searching the stages of death because lying next to me in a twin bed was my husband Ross and I was struggling to get to sleep because I was listening to his breathing and wondering which breath would be the last now after my google search I realized I probably had a few more days with him so I used that time wisely and I decided that I knew I couldn't change what was happening and that trying to fight it was going to prolong the pain and suffering so I decided to practice acceptance acceptance that my husband was going to die acceptance my life was going to change I looked for the around the pain and I took back my power Ross had been diagnosed with brain cancer in February 2014 and it was bad from the start grateful rare a PN 80 tumor normally found in children normally found at the back of the head his was at the front and 50-50 chance of survival in five years and when we went to that first meeting with the oncologist dr. Spooner at all empathetic man who wore odd socks carried the most battered and bruised briefcase you've ever seen and much to the horror of my husband always role in read by role on that first meeting my husband asked why do I have a children's brain tumor why is it the front of my head when it's normally at the back and that kind doctor look my husband in the eyes he leant forward and he said I don't know why you've got brain cancer the answer was refreshingly honest we spend our lives searching for meaning trying to make sense of it all sometimes torturing ourselves over the seeming unfairness of a situation why always us will say why always the good ones but unfortunately that's just not true it's not just the good guys that go through troubling times it's all of us psychologists call this the just world myth that if I am good good things will happen to me and we all know this isn't true we can do our very best and still feel we can love with the purest love and we can still have our hearts broken professor Leon f seltzer calls these our finds for just being alive that it doesn't matter how good we are we cannot escape the inevitable truth that unfairness will still occur after Ross's diagnosis and awareness first brain so I found myself on my own for perhaps the first time since the diagnosis and I walked into my house and I looked at it like a stranger seen it for the first time pictures on the wall the pulse left out on the table everything just frozen in a time before Ross had cancer and I sat down on the floor and I cried really cried the type of crying where you think you're never gonna stop but in that moment I had more clarity than I've ever had in my entire life because in my moment I realized that nobody was going to fix this for me and if I wanted to have a happy life regardless of all of the challenges then it was down to me so I picked myself up off the floor drive my eyes put on a ton of makeup and I decided to do whatever it took to get me and my family through this time in our lives when I speak to mentally strong people there are commonalities in how they deal with life they don't feel sorry for themselves they aren't ashamed to cry and be vulnerable where needed they don't feel like the world owes them anything and they're willing to be adaptable Ross dying was and is one of the most painful things in my life and people can often find it hard to understand how I can stand here and talk so openly about my pain and my loss they might also find it hard to understand how I can move forward or why I don't fit the stereotype of a widow but I believe that we are taught a very skewed idea of fairness from a young age and we simply won't let go of it into adulthood and while we're focused on some injustice that we feel that we have or are going through we completely stuck in this pain and in order for us to become unstuck there has to be a level of acceptance and responsibility that comes into play I mean what if the world really was fair for everyone if you and I we could create this wild utopia where everybody got everything that they wanted what would that actually look like maybe only the evil people would get sick that's all right we'd all be beautiful just totally subjective and everybody would always win meaning none of us actually won this insane world of fairness is not only implausible but the idea that it should or could ever happen is stopping us from living in our right now and that doesn't mean not fighting for equality and standing up to injustice but it does mean on a very personal level and if you want to be happy then you have to learn to accept there are some parts of your life that are just gonna be unfair and there are huge chunks of your life that you have no control over so let's think about your life for a moment you all have a thing you will have a painful thing what would happen if you let go of the expectation of fairness how might you respond differently how might that affect your emotions or your experience of the world perhaps instead of feeling stock you would start to look for the lessons in what you're going through and feel really truly grateful for the good bits in your life perhaps instead of focusing on the things you don't want you'd begin focusing on the things you do want the things you can control not the things that you cannot am i grateful for my husband's death absolutely not I wish that he was here more than anything but I can't change the fact that he's died 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 recognize that you might not be able to control any of that external stuff but you can damn well control the internal stuff so when life gets tough which it will stop have you cried have your moment and then get up and work out a new plan Sheryl Sandberg wrote a book called option B after the sudden death of her husband which focuses on when your plan a is taken away from you what will be your option B and most of us get so caught up in how our lives should look that we can actually become quite inflexible and rigid so when we are forced into our plan B there can be a freedom in this when Ross died I realized that I didn't really understand the world very much because the world I knew my plan a definitely had Ross alive in it so when Plan B was my reality I had just had to stay open to what might come next and listen to the lessons I was being taught because life really is just a series of moments lessons and experiences and we just have to soak up these moments of joy with the people we love while we have them and let go of grasping onto things in order to hold on to them free yourself of the burden of everything playing out exactly as you think it should because even with the best planning and execution in the world it probably won't free yourself of the expectation of expecting fairness and a level playing field because it's never gonna happen there is always gonna be somebody better looking better at your job who will live a long happy healthy life with the person they love money in the bank supportive family so what what are you gonna do about it because you guys are not unlucky it doesn't come in threes and it's not just you be kind to yourself forgive yourself and not all is getting it right and recognize that being resilient to the tough stuff it's not about what you can endure it's about resting recuperating and living fully in your moments in between thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 79,406

Rating: 4.8789158 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Life, Death, Love, Personal growth, Self-help

Id: t01org0fOf4

Length: 17min 46sec (1066 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 07 2019