Nobody’s Thinking About You

How often do you worry that other people are thinking about you? Talking behind your back, criticising what you do. And then how much time and effort do you take trying to conform to these thoughts? Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, wrote the following in her book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear:

Long ago, when I was in my insecure twenties, I met a clever, independent, creative, and powerful woman in her mid-seventies, who offered me a superb piece of life wisdom. She said: “We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect, because we’re so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of us.

But you won’t be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth – nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow.”

They aren’t. They weren’t. They never were.

People are mostly just thinking about themselves. People don’t have time to worry about what you’re doing, or how well you’re doing it, because they’re all caught up in their own dramas…Go be whomever you want to be, then…Create whatever you want to create – and let it be stupendously imperfect, because it’s exceedingly likely that nobody will even notice. And that’s awesome.

It is important that no matter where you are in your career, from student through to experienced clinician, that you run your own race. Don’t worry about what other people might think about the choices you make, the lifestyle you lead or even the way you dress. Chances are they are too worried about their own lives to be thinking of you. So save your energy and put it to good use.