Experiencing A Simple, Yet Powerful, Act of Love

In my first blog post, I talked about my constant battle with my long-standing FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). Taking the advice of one of my best friends, every time my FOMO would come back, I would try and think back to what was I doing that was life-giving, helping myself, or something similar. If I wasn’t doing something and was starting to feel like I was missing out, I must’ve been doing something to help myself. But what happens when that doesn’t work? I stared at that situation straight in my face today.

Two months or so ago there was a Senior Night at school. To try to explain it, our student government puts on a Senior Night for all the seniors where they can essentially celebrate being seniors. Last quarter it started at 10 PM or (some similarly super late time like that) on a Tuesday night. In addition, with some sort of donation, there is a “souvenir” or something that can only be obtained by going to said Senior Night.

Flash forward to today. I was sitting in Campus Ministry around noon hanging out and doing the usual. Eventually within a 5-10 minute period, a whole bunch of seniors, like 8 or so of them, who I’m friends with were all congregating around the desk. Most of them stated their excitement at receiving their souvenirs, which are steins marked with our class year on it. Within all my friends’ excitement about receiving the steins, I stood there feeling awkward inside and rather uncomfortable. Of course naturally I happened to be the one person within that group of senior friends that wasn’t getting a stein. I started being consumed by my FOMO again. I tried to think back, “What was I doing during that Senior Night that was beneficial to me?” Sleeping? Doing homework? Having a conversation with someone? I couldn’t remember; I was drawing blanks. I spent the next hour or so dwelling on how I had missed out on Senior Night and didn’t have that memento that so many of my friends had and were excited about. My FOMO has always been a part of me and in this case, it had activated full force. In my head, I had missed out and I was seeing it in plain sight with all my friends who were moments away from obtaining these mementos. Despite all my best efforts, I was allowing my FOMO with Senior Night to make me feel crappy about myself.

Before I move on, I do want to emphasize that none of my friends could have known they ended up activating my FOMO; they had every reason to be excited after all. Most times when my FOMO activates, it’s innocent and unintentional and is no fault of anyone. That is true in this case.

There were other events through the day that allowed me to shove my FOMO to the side and not let it affect me. Walking around the Villas after dinner at Pintrest Palace, I ran into my friend Katherine Burkhuch who happened to be in Campus Ministry while my FOMO was consuming me (I had started talking about it to those who were in CM after all my other friends left to claim their steins). Katherine stopped for a moment and told me that my name had been included in the list to contact if there were extra steins. I smiled and told her I really appreciated it and went on my way.

Saying “I really appreciated it” turned out to be a massive understatement. During the drive home, I kept thinking back to that moment. Katherine had made her best efforts to alleviate my FOMO. When I couldn’t do it for myself, she took the time to think of me, consider me, and wanted to make me feel included. With these thoughts in mind, I started to feel a rush of emotion. I felt loved and I felt like I mattered enough to someone that they’d make the time and effort to reach out and include me. It filled me with just pure happiness. Out of compassion, love, or whatever it may be, Katherine took the time to reach out her hand to the lonely dark corner I was in and helped pull me out. For someone who has had many experiences of the proverbial lonely dark corner in my life, having someone pull me out of that corner means a lot.

A few days ago, I checked in with one of my mentors about life. One of the things we touched upon was how I shower love on people a lot. She challenged me to find the balance between showing love to other people and letting other people show it to me. Taking it in, this is really a moment where I allowed Katherine’s act of love to surround me. For something I’ve always struggled with, this act of love came at the right moment. And really, it’s amazing what a simple act or consideration for someone else can do. I’ve done my best to do it for other people but when it’s done to you, I feel like it’s that much more impactful. And my mentor’s advice about letting people show love to me really came to life.

Whether I ultimately receive the stein or not doesn’t matter. I may even feel I wouldn’t deserve it because I wasn’t at Senior Night. The stein would be cool, but it’s not really the point of why I’m writing this. Sometimes when all else fails, letting someone do an act of compassion for me is the best way of doing things. My negative feelings because of my FOMO got replaced with an act of love shown by someone else to me. Was it a simple act of love? Yeah it was. But it was powerful. All it took was a simple act of compassion to assist me in batting my FOMO. It really is amazing.

A Snapshot into the Core of Joe Sarmiento

A few weeks ago, I heard a talk where somebody made the point that passion originates from

suffering. He said many of our passions come directly from our suffering and used Jesus’ example (suffering on the cross because he was so passionate about saving humanity) to illustrate that point. Essentially, what we develop our passions because of our sufferings. It’s a really good point actually. Upon reflection, I found most of the things I’m passionate about are because I’ve suffered one way or another. I could write a whole series of blog posts about this, but I’ll see in due time if that happens.

My mind likes to wander a lot; there is always something on my mind. One particular day on a jog, I was starting to think about this notion again. I felt like I was onto something and had one of those retrospective thoughts. It regards something that is at my core and makes me who I am today. As far as I know, I’ve only shared about this once: when I led Kairos 92 at Bellarmine as a senior, 4 years ago. Not that I can read minds, but I’m sure many people have probably asked themselves one version of this question, “How is Joe so full of energy and full of life?” I bet I've been asked that question myself. With that in mind, I’m here to answer that question. And maybe, just maybe you’ll understand me a little bit better than you did before reading.

When I was in 7^th grade, I had a big problem personality-wise: I had a really short temper. I was really easy to make fun of because people knew I would get frustrated quickly. I’ve always been sensitive but at this stage in my life, my buttons were easily pushed. I would yell, scream, and be out of control. I was hurt and would quickly take it out on people. Even as a 7^th grader, I was really outspoken about certain things. Most notably, I loved Cal football and absolutely despised Stanford. That’s still true today but I trumpeted that much more in middle school.

This anger issue came to a head one day in Mrs. Richter’s pre-algebra class. We had some extra time at the end of class. I don’t remember how this happened, but some people, including one of my middle school friends, decided to write on the whiteboard some version of “Go Stanford! Boo Cal!” I…was…livid. Filled with anger, I walked up to that friend and proceeded to twist his wrist tightly to seize that whiteboard marker out of his hand. Well, Mrs. Richter noticed my fit of anger and I proceeded to get called out. That wasn’t the end of it; I got a misconduct slip for my actions. Upon receiving that little red slip, my heart dropped and I realized, “Oh no…my parents are going to know about this.” A little while after this, Mrs. Richter and my parents had a talk (with me in the room) explaining my short temper was a huge issue. I don’t remember what we talked about that day after school but at least my parents knew about my problem.

Before 8^th grade started, I made a promise to myself. Whenever people would try to get me angry, I would smile at them. I would smile at people and at everything in general instead of letting my anger get the best of me. Slowly but surely, times I would get angry would be replaced by times where I’d smile and laugh things off. Thankfully, I reached the point where my anger became a non-issue; I’m all the better for it.

When I think about and reflect upon this experience, I realize I’m still living out this promise today. This takes many different forms: joking around, sharing smiles with people around me, being with people and enjoying their presence, and many more ways. This experience is more deep-rooted within me than I realize sometimes. It's something that makes me...me.

I’d like to conclude by answering the question I posed early in this blog post: “How is Joe Sarmiento full of energy and full of life?” Here is my answer:

I suffered in the past because I would allow myself to become angry and be wary of people. Because of this suffering, I took it upon myself to live life in a different way as a result. I committed myself to live a life full of smiles instead of anger. This is why I have such an energetic and full-of-life personality.