Where the Wild Things Are

When I was at King's Gym yesterday, the first thing trainer Ed King did with me was address my experience with negativity last week (see Little Miss Sunshine post). He described a somewhat parallel situation many years ago when he was planning to compete in a bodybuilding competition but he intended to do it without drug use. The trainer he worked with said no way, forget it, you'll lose, don't bother. Drug use was rampant then, but Ed was vehemently opposed to them. He trained hard and won. Won, as in first place, with no drug enhancement. The point: ignore the naysayers. His words overlap with my recent viewing of Where the Wild Things Are, and while I didn't love the film, it made me think a lot. Essentially, the film captures many of the frustrations of being an 8 -yr.-old child. People get mad at you - your friends, your parents, maybe strangers - and you feel like there's nothing you can do. Things aren't fair, and again, there's nothing you can do. Max, the child in the story, creates an alternate reality for himself as king of the wild things, but eventually the wild things figure out he's not really a king. "What are you then?" they want to know. "I'm Max." That's all he is. That's all any of us is. But the difference between a child and an adult is control. Max gets out of control frequently because he can't manage his emotions. He also can't control his environment, at home or anywhere else. Some neighborhood kids smash his igloo and he's infuriated. But an adult can act with greater freedom, can mentally process with greater sophistication and can filter out others' negativity by rejecting or compartmentalizing it. I don't know what my outcome will be because my story is still unfolding, but what I do know is that I can control which messages I take to heart and which ones I set aside. So let the wild rumpus continue....