On rolling while rolling

I was sitting with a friend in a his apartment. I was there to dig through a big life decision I was facing and had (in addition with the support of my close friend) a wile earlier ingested a healthy dose of MDMA to assist me in my process. After what I assume was a somewhat long rant by me, my friend looked at me and said: "You seem like you're in your head about this, would you like to roll a bit?" 

'Rolling' is what sparring is called in Brazilian jiu jitsu (BJJ). I could write pages and pages about BJJ, but for the sake of staying on topic here I will just say that it's a martial art that focuses on the ground game and is highly practical and technical.

While we were rolling around on the floor and having lots of fun in my heightened state of awareness it suddenly hit me; I was just having fun, feeling free and rolling with him as a friend. I didn't see him as my opponent. The next realization came as quickly as the first; I had been seeing the person I was rolling with as my adversary every single time up until that point. Feeling like they were judging me for "not being good enough", that I "was taking up their time when they could be doing something better". Multiple times a week. For more than three years. Unaware of my inner dialogue and thoughts, I had made the crucial mistake of confusing them with actual reality. Projecting my own insecurities onto other people, and that they were judging me.

An experience of something else

I am someone who enjoys thinking about stuff. It's something I'm proud of in many ways. It's gotten me to where I am today, and I like the process of it. One thing I have learned over the past couple of years though is that my big shifts in perspective don't usually come from my thinking. It comes from an experience. An experience of "something else". Like the example with wrestling a friend and feeling free making me see I was trapped in a mental model I was unaware of. Had you asked me before that evening if I "Thought the people around me were my enemies and that they were judging me" I would probably calmly have answered "No", unaware of the things that were affecting me. 

I would be lying if I said these thoughts of being an outsider still don't creep up on me, but now I'm much more aware of the fact that it's a thought and not objective data. A thought I can re-frame into something more in line with reality, or at least the way I want to act in it. And for me one of the most powerful re-frames I know, when with another person, is this; "Same team".