There’s a picture painted in the opening lines of Bebo Norman’s Falling Down that has stayed with me for years:
“Angel’s on a subway
She’s buried in a magazine
Stuck inside a replay
Of someone else’s dream”
Now Playing
Song: “Falling Down”
Artist: Bebo Norman
Watch, then come back.
We spend a lot of time trying to figure out the “right” way to be human.
What does success look like?
What does strength look like?
What does a good parent look like?
A good partner?
A good friend?
A responsible adult?
What does taking care of yourself look like?
Apparently, at some point, there was a very important committee meeting where all of this was decided. Most of us missed it, yet somehow, we still got the handbook.
We absorb expectations from everywhere. Family. School. Work. Culture. Religion. Advertising. Television. Social media. News. The people around us. The people we admire. Even complete strangers who have never met us but appear remarkably confident about how everybody else ought to live.
Some of those expectations are useful. Some help us grow. Some give us structure. Some fit us beautifully. But some don’t. And when we see the same picture often enough, it becomes surprisingly easy to stop seeing it as somebody’s version of reality and start treating it as reality itself.
In reality, it’s a frame. Not the entire landscape.
That matters when we talk about self-care.
Self-care is often presented as something we need to add. Drink more water. Get enough sleep. Exercise. Journal. Meditate. Take a break. Go outside. All perfectly reasonable suggestions. But sometimes caring for ourselves isn’t about adding anything at all.
Sometimes it begins with asking: Is the life I’m trying so hard to live actually mine? Is this something I genuinely value? Is this what I need? Does this expectation fit who I really am or want to be? Or have I simply seen one version of “normal” so many times that I stopped questioning it?
We can put ourselves under enormous pressure trying to become people we were never meant to be. That could be pushing ourselves to be more social, less emotional, more ambitious, but maybe not that ambitious. We can work harder to be more successful, more available, more productive. Bend ourselves to be more agreeable, more independent while trying to stand out and remain comfortably recognizable at the same time.
Sometimes the kindest thing we can do for ourselves is stop long enough to ask whether the picture we’re struggling to fit into deserves that much authority. Not reject every expectation. Not decide nobody else has anything useful to teach us.
Just make enough room to look again..
Grace can’t stop with only ourselves.
This is where self-care becomes part of something much larger. If I want room to be more than somebody else’s assumptions about me, to decide what fits my life, I have to remember that other people deserve the same thing. Other people deserve that same room.
They may need something I wouldn’t need. Choose something I wouldn’t choose. Believe something I don’t believe. Recover differently. Love differently. Work differently. Rest differently. See the same situation and come away with a completely different understanding of what happened.
That doesn’t automatically make either of us wrong. It means neither of us is standing everywhere at once. A frame can contain something true and still leave something out. And right now, we live inside systems that are exceptionally good at handing us frames.
Algorithms learn what gets our attention and show us more of it. News outlets know what keeps us watching. Companies know what makes us click. The more we interact with certain ideas, people, stories, and opinions, the more systems learn to give us similar ones. Eventually, the world coming through our screens can begin to look suspiciously like the whole world.
It isn’t.
Your feed is not the world.
My feed isn’t the whole world either. Neither is one news channel. One political party. One generation. One religion. One community. One social circle. One experience. One label.
The interference isn’t simply that these frames exist. We all use frames. Our brains need ways to organize enormous amounts of information. The trouble begins when we forget to look beyond them. When ‘this is what I keep seeing’ quietly becomes ‘this is how things are.’ When ‘this is what people like me believe’ becomes ‘this is what reasonable people believe.’ When one thing we know about another person becomes everything we think we need to know.
When somebody else’s dream becomes the standard against which we measure our own life.
There is always more outside the frame.
There is always more outside the frame. And that doesn’t mean we have to agree with everything we find there. Curiosity does not require surrendering your beliefs. Listening does not mean agreeing. Understanding somebody’s choices does not require adopting them.
Grace does not require pretending harmful behavior is harmless. It simply means leaving enough room for the possibility that what we can currently see is not everything there is to know. About others, about the world, and about ourselves. That may be something our modern world most desperately needs us to remember.
We are being sorted constantly. Ask anyone working in Marketing. We’re sorted by age, race, politics, religion, income, education, gender, where we live, what we buy, what we watch, what we click. Even what we believe. Every one of those things can tell us something. None of them can tell us everything.
We are more connected than the boxes we’re being sorted into.
We all laugh. We all grieve. We all get scared. We all want to belong. We all want the people we love to be okay. We all want our lives to mean something. We all make mistakes. We change our minds. We contradict ourselves. We get things spectacularly wrong. We try again. We discover that something we once believed no longer fits. Sometimes we discover that something we rejected years ago makes more sense from where we stand now.
We are complicated. Sometimes gloriously so. Maybe that’s why those opening words from Falling Down have stayed with me for so long.
Someone else’s dream.
There is nothing wrong with learning from somebody else’s dream. Being inspired by it. Borrowing pieces of it. Discovering that some of it fits you beautifully. But we should probably know when we’re living inside one.
Maybe caring for ourselves sometimes means giving ourselves permission to step outside the frame long enough to see what we actually want, need, believe, and value. Maybe caring about other people means resisting the urge to build a frame around them and insist they stay inside it.
Make time to take a closer look at some of those frames. The ones we inherit. The ones we build. The ones algorithms keep reinforcing. The ones we may not even realize we’re looking through. Not because everything we see is wrong.
But because there is almost always more to see.
A Few Questions to Sit With
- Where might I be trying to fit a picture that doesn’t really fit me?
- Which expectations in my life have I actually chosen, and which ones have I simply absorbed?
- When was the last time I genuinely listened to a perspective outside my comfort zone without preparing my rebuttal?
- Who might I be seeing through a label, role, or assumption instead of as a whole person?
- What might become possible if I remembered that my frame is real, but it isn’t the whole landscape?