Accepting gifts can be weird sometimes, am I right?
When someone gifts us something whether it's a compliment, a hug, a drink, a meal, money, a scholarship, a house, a second chance at life...
Things can get weird.
Insecurities can get triggered.
We can find ourselves questioning...
Do I deserve this?
Do I belong here?
Am I worthy?
Am I enough?
Do they really like me?
What if I screw this up?
*Queue dramatic series of even more weird, yet totally normal questions*
Are they just trying to manipulate me?
What do they want?
Is this like when Regina George complimented that girl's bracelet that she actually hated in Mean Girls? (okay, very specific question I know, but damn that's a good movie!)
My point being receiving gifts, physical or intangible, can trigger this thing called our Upper Limit.
Our upper limit is the tolerance cap for how much happiness we will allow ourselves to experience. Anything beyond this is uncomfortable and thus may trigger us to self-sabotage. This is where the crazy questioning and unconscious behaviors show themselves in an attempt to prevent us from receiving the gifts we adore so much.
Feeling something good can sometimes feel intolerable at the same time...
Wild how the mind can work, right?
But, don't worry, in the words of Marie Forleo "Everything is figureoutable."
Take it from me.
I recently was gifted some leftover Serrano peppers from a neighbor and was SO excited about receiving the gift! My upper limit? Not triggered at all.
To be clear, I remember a day in my own past where something small like this would have me so excited AND I would have drove myself crazy with what now seems like silly and unnecessarily exhausting questions. Questions like... Why me? Is she just trying to unload her trash on me? Is this woman going to want something from me later? Am I going to owe her something? And so on and so forth.
Now, none of those questions plague me. I'm able to just sit in the excitement that I was chosen to receive such a great gift...
This woman knew she couldn't use the giant bag of Serrano peppers she had laying around in her house, so she gifted them to me.
Another person's trash truly can be another person's treasure - HELLO, fermented hot sauce!