Where Our Attention Goes, So Goes Our Life

Let's get the obvious out of the way; the guy who actively seeks the limelight to tell stories will have thoughts on the type of attention we desire. My family has a good joke, and it's a good joke because it's true. John always takes advantage of an opportunity to grab the microphone. After twenty years of working in social work and seeking the storytelling stage, I have gone from using the term attention seeking as a bad thing to understanding we all seek attention. We all have different goals when we seek attention. It's a healthy action for humans to engage in. We are social creatures that need attention from others to fill our buckets.

Yet, my relationship with this concept has been forever changed. See, at first, I wanted attention to hide my depression and suicidal thinking as a young teen and young adult. Next, I moved on to only focusing my attention on everything going wrong. I never expected anything to work out, always looking to fight with those around me. It was negative attention to feed my view of the world. As I grew into myself and my role in society, I saw what real attention-seeking was and why people needed it. The loneliness, rejection, and doubt many of us carry with us often leads to seeking attention from all the wrong sources.

The problem with how and from whom we seek attention directly correlates to how well our lives function. Seek it from the wrong people or people in the wrong way, and we end up in a bind. Seek it the wrong way from the correct people, and we end in a bind. Seek it from the proper people in the wrong way; we end up in a bind. Our lives will eventually be revealed at essential and crucial moments when we focus on seeking the proper ways to deal with the people who matter the most.

The proper ways and the people who matter the most will change throughout our lives as we mature, grow, learn, and become different versions of ourselves. At some point, the time and ways we seek other people's attention will come into focus, and we will have to live with the results. As someone who struggled with this concept at one point, I regret how I sought my attention at different points in my life. I'm incredibly proud of how I have grown into how I do it now. And it's undeniable that where and to whom our attention goes is a barometer of our life.

I know this from life experience. The graph of my life getting better is a mirror version of realizing who I give my attention to and whom I allow to give me attention are the same. It's easy to write this stuff and say it's about others, but it never really is. It's about understanding our attention is our currency, which eventually pays on the return of investment or costs you a lot. We must ask ourselves whether we are building a wealth of memories or going bankrupt. There was a time when I was running on fumes; now, not so much. It feels great to get and give the attention that makes things better.