Internal Conflictions

Over the past couple of weeks, part of me has been very preoccupied with some personal concerns. What's worrying me? What am I longing for or missing? What makes me sad? What bothers me? You get the drift, it's very me-me-me. And then another part of me has been beating myself up about these self-centered preoccupations.

A lot of people who I love are going through some very hard times right now. I personally have gone through times much worse than these. And then, on a global scale, my problems are underwhelming. I ought to be more appreciative of what I have. Moreover, there are a lot better and more productive uses for my attention. What good does sitting around sulking do anyway?

But then a third part of myself is thinking a little bit more sympathetically. By which I mean, I am trying not to be too hard on myself. Sorry to get a little bit cliche here, but I'm going to quote The Perks of Being a Wallflower: "even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really change the fact that you have what you have." Sometimes it's hard for me to stop myself from invalidating my own feelings.

A brief example: earlier this summer, I turned 22. Months before I started planning a celebration. It would be outdoors, it would be based around Pushing Daisies, I would dress up like Charlotte Charles, and my friends and I would eat pies from mason jars while sitting on my back deck. But then, I learned, that such a dream was an unreality. My best friend would be a counselor at residents' camp that week, and oddly enough another one of my friends would be a counselor at church camp that week, too. Plus, my father had a surgery scheduled for the day before my birthday. In short, all of the people who would typically want to celebrate my birthday with me, wouldn't be able to. And I was really, really upset about it. But I felt so ashamed talking to anyone about it because my dad was having surgery, there were other, more important things we needed to be concerned about. Now, almost a complete month later, I'm still feeling both disappointed about my birthday not turning out the way I would have liked, and ashamed about the fact that I'm disappointed. (Seriously, seriously ashamed here: my dad is recovering so well and so quickly but I'm petty enough to be disappointed that only two people hung out with me on my birthday.)

So this is the first of my current, internal conflicts. Not the birthday thing, that was just an example. It's this: what's the appropriate amount of attention to pay to one's personal problems? My own happiness is important--that's something that has taken years for me realize and probably will take me years more to adequately conceptualize--but I really shouldn't let that monopolize my time and energy. Focusing on my personal problems makes me miserable... but then, when I pay them no attention, I can wind up feeling resentful, or I can wind up still upset about things that should have been over with a month ago.

This is already pretty long, so I'll just briefly outline some of my other internal conflicts.

1. To what extent do I work for what I want, and to what extent do I just trust God? Because, obviously, you can't just sit around thinking, "God will work everything out" that's really not fair to Him. (It's like that story about the man whose drowning but he trusts God will save him so he lets a helicopter, a boat, and a bunch of other things leave and then, when he dies, he's like, "God why didn't you save him?" and God's like, "Why didn't you get on the boat/helicopter/everything else I sent your way?")
2. If an individual has really hurt me: do I forgive, forget, and let them back into my life--because not forgiving makes me miserable--or do I just cut them out of my life--because having them in my life has repetitively made me miserable? Is there some middle ground? And how do I deal with the middle ground? 
3. I believe that personal pride/happiness/comfort is very important...but I also believe that God wants us to care for and serve others. And what's the middle ground there? Actually, I think this one could be solved if I could just find a whole lot of pleasure out of having other people talk to me... how does one get a lot of joy out of other people talking to them? 

Huh. I was kind of thinking that after I typed all of this out I would come up with some sort of balanced-based conclusion, but I didn't.