By Dina Aldabbagh

I think the most important place you can get to in your life is the one where essentially anything can happen and you can just say, “This just doesn’t matter.” Some communities call it detachment, others call it the peace of God — I think whatever you call it, it’s a posture that matters if you want to live a peaceful life. Not everything can matter to you. 

I think you have to get to this point of looking something right in the face — something that sucks, something that you don’t want — and just saying, “That’s just not important.” Which is really to say: “This is inconsequential, it doesn’t get to bother me.” When you are bothered by things, you are in effect saying “This matters.” But when you are unbothered, it speaks another thing — “This doesn’t matter.”

But, okay, sometimes things do bother us. That’s okay, we’re human. And while it is totally okay to be a human being, to be bothered by something, and to be emotional, if you don’t pay attention to your reaction, you can spiral quickly. Feeling things is no issue. The problem comes when a feeling — that was just a temporary experience — begins influencing your behavior. There’s no consequence to feeling something — you’re not going to get in trouble. There is however a consequence to our actions. If you cannot regulate yourself so that you don’t act out in the face of your emotions, then you will actually impact your life. Therefore we must learn how to deal with our emotions so they do not alter our behavior in ways we don’t want. 

The inability to regulate yourself and bring your nervous system back to equilibrium can easily lead to something being taken away from you as well. It takes away your power, for one. Not by feeling something, but by the choice to harp on it. You can feel bothered and choose to let it go or you can feel bothered and choose to continue thinking about it. The choice to continue thinking about it is where being bothered affects us — because that’s making this thing that’s bothering you a locative point of your identity. 

Whatever moves you — positively or negatively — speaks to who you are. And I do not just mean what emotionally moves you, I mean whatever out in this world that is able to have an influence on your behavior — aka: how you show up, aka: your identity — is a light that gives shape to you. It exposes you. 

On that same token, whatever is totally neutral is also a revealing indicator of your identity. Whatever you like, dislike, love, hate, or don’t care about says something about you — and I don’t mean to others, although it does. This, however, is not about them. You identify yourself by what affects you. 

If I’m a confident girl who believes other people love me, then even if someone rudely said to me, “This is why no one likes you!” I’d just laugh. I’d say, “Yeah, okay.” Because that isn’t my truth. Maybe a clearer analogy is: if you have blond hair and someone came up to you and said “Your hair is purple,” you’d just brush it off. You’d actually think, “Something must be off with them because I have blond hair.” Your identity to you is clear: blond hair. Therefore no matter what color hair anyone else says you have, you know it’s not true. This applies just as much to the subjective parts of your identity as well. 

When the world acts in a way that is clearly not in line with who you actually are, you don’t even consider it. It doesn’t bother you, because it feels outside of you. It feels so out of line that it’s inconsequential. However, if someone says you have purple hair — when your hair is actually blond — and you freak out, then that says a lot more about you. Why are you insecure over that? Is it not a fact that you have blond hair? What’s going on with you that a comment that, in reality, has nothing to do with your truth ends up bothering you? Then…what is your truth? 

When you’re choosing to keep thinking about the thing that you don’t like — aka choosing to continue bothering yourself — you’re also painting yourself a picture of your identity. On the other hand, this also applies to what you choose to not be bothered by. If you get rejected by a job, but you stay unbothered by it, that tells your subconscious mind, “I don’t believe this rejection is consequential.” Then, the mind has to make sense of why you wouldn’t find not getting a job consequential — when we all need jobs to make money and therefore live. So then your subconscious fills in the gap: “It’s inconsequential because I’m the type of person that….

Choose your fighter:

• …I’m the person that gets plenty of opportunities.
• …I’m the person for whom everything works out exactly how it should.
• …I’m the person that doesn’t ever need to worry about things because everything always ends up alright. 
• …I’m the person that always has sufficient funds to be taken care of. 

The biggest strength you could possibly have in life must be self-sovereignty. When nothing is your master, when you idolize nothing, when nothing has the power to take away your peace or make you act out of character — that is power. Power is not what you can inflict onto others or control outside of yourself. It is far more an indication of power to be ruled by nothing. When a person stays the same despite whatever happens outside of their control, that’s true integrity. 

It’s powerful because when you stay consistent in your behavior, thought, and emotional wellbeing (a regulated nervous system), then no matter what happens, you will get the good things that are meant for you. People don’t lose out on opportunities because they’re not good enough, but rather because they’re not consistent enough. 

I think the very important thing to notice is that you don’t ruin things for good by making one mistake. Okay, you skewed a bit from your goal this one time, so what? Rather, you ruin things consistently. Your consistent behavior is what ruins or achieves things, it’s not just one action. Because anything is forgivable and any consistency in the other direction will get you the thing you want 100% of the time. 

Think of a person who wants to lose weight. If they eat in a calorie deficit for long enough, it is scientifically inevitable that they will lose fat. If they don’t lose fat, it has nothing to do with any moral judgments on them as a person or definitive identity traits, but is only because they’re not sticking with the calorie deficit for long enough to see a difference. 

You can literally eat so bad for years and years and years and gain so much weight, but that doesn’t ruin you for good. All you have to do is be consistent enough in the other direction and now you’ve changed things. Nothing is actually permanent. Everything can change. You just have to be consistent for long enough in that identity for it to change.

So it’s really just the fact that one is being inconsistent that they do not get the things they want. That’s why it’s so important to be self-sovereign. Autonomy and ownership over your behavior — despite whatever else is going on — gives you the power to decide your identity, and therefore stay consistent in it long enough to get the things that are for you.

A person once told me that they treated people differently based on who each of the people were. Not in the sense of “meeting people where they’re at,” but rather changing the standard of their treatment towards them. The question then becomes: Are you treating them how they are or how you are? If you change your behavior based on the actions, words, and feelings of other people, then you let them change you. 

That’s a decision to not have integrity in the person you are. On a more real and less moral-sounding level, that’s a decision to let them dictate the consistency of your identity and therefore have control over the consequences of your life. If you decide that you will only be kind to others if they are kind back to you, then you are made unkind. Therefore, you get the consequences that unkind people get. 

That’s why this is so important. That’s why. If things can affect the way you show up in the world, then they will impact what kind of life you get as a consequence. It doesn’t matter at all what happens — how the circumstances look or what other people say or do — nobody can change you or do anything to emotionally move you if you are secure enough in your identity. If you are secure in your identity, then you will continue to be consistent in that identity regardless of how things look or what others do. Because nothing matters except who you be. Who are you showing up as? That is literally the only thing that matters.

Therefore, when things cannot move you to change the integrity of your identity, you are powerful. So now, whatever may happen, but it will not turn you around. You will stay who you are and inevitably, eventually, get exactly what’s for you. When you let your behavior be decided by the ways in which others behave, then you get what’s for them. If someone yells at you, so you yell back — well now you, too, are a yeller. You’ve now come into agreement with their identity. You’ve let it change you. You will get the consequences of that.

So today I prompt you to say, in the face of all the things that you do not like, “This just doesn’t matter.” And I hope you know what you’re actually saying is: “This doesn’t get to change me.” It doesn’t get to have that power over you. Your identity is secure, no matter what thing happens or what that person says. 

“The peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds” (NIV Philippians 4:7). Peace is not something you care about for someone else’s benefit; it’s something you care about for you. When you are at peace — when you say “This doesn’t matter to me, this doesn’t affect me, I’m unmoved” — your heart and your mind are protected. That might sound spiritual, but it’s actually completely mechanical. If something happens and yet your mind doesn’t freak out and you don’t go down the spiral of negative emotions, then your identity is secure. The person you want to be is only not secure if you allow these things to change you. 

I’ve discussed this excerpt before from Aldous Huxley in Island, “There are quicksands all about you, sucking your feet, trying to suck you down into self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling…” The advice is: “Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.” In other words, we can understand that we must ultimately not let things matter so much to us if we want to stay sane and continue going in a positive way forward. 

It’s so easy to be swayed by how the things around us look in the moment — as easy as it is to wallow in despair and be consumed by anxiety. It’s quite hard to live out, but easy to let happen. And that happens only when we take things too seriously. My most sincere advice to you, today and always, is to not let it matter so much to you. Don’t believe the performance of seriousness that tells you that you have to care. You don’t.