A few weeks ago, I came home to see this:While I was running an errand, someone decided to do their Christmas shopping at my house. All in all, not much was gone. After the hassle of fixing the door and filing for insurance, things are pretty much back to normal.
Some say the hardest part of a break in is the sense of invasion, of your private space becoming public. Certainly, that has been frustrating. Particularly when I discovered that they were using my laptop and my Netflix account to watch movies…it's especially hard when you see their terrible taste in film.
Seeing my closet ransacked and my drawers dumped out has made me feel exposed, and even moreso when I realized that my journal from the past year was in my laptop bag and they now have access to my most personal thoughts.
But that hasn't been the most frustrating part of this for me.
The thing that makes anger rise up in me is the selfishness of it. If any of the people who kicked in my door came home to find someone else in their house, they would go ballistic…and rightfully so. And yet, they have decided to do the same to someone else. They are so self-focused that it does not occur to them that what they're doing will impact someone else so negatively. Or perhaps they do realize it and have simply decided that their financial interests take precedence over my sense of security and comfort in my own home. It's possible that they know exactly what they're doing, but I think it's more likely that they are simply so selfish and inwardly focused that they don't even think of me as a person.
As Christmas quickly approaches, maybe the lesson I'm learning is this. It's not a new one, but my broken front door has reinforced it. Don't be selfish. Think about others and put yourself in their shoes. The hardest part for me wasn't the finances or the stuff…it was that the ones who tossed my closet decided I wasn't really a person.
