I’m pretty sure you all knew that I wasn’t going to write about what I hinted at last week, because life happens. Or doesn’t, to be fair. Time is a fickle beast. So, let’s just move on, eh?
Also, this is going to be very, very short.
I have no idea how this song snuck onto my radar as a kid, but I’m going to assume the radio had something to do with it. (If you can’t remember a time where the radio and/or fanzines got you into new shit, this blog is not for you). Regardless of its origin and my disregard of the band’s popularity – and my being the ripe old age of about 12 – I found the song’s lyrics resonated with me in such a way that it’s still a go to for my brain’s playback system whenever I am about to head straight down into the welcoming arms of the great abyss:
Makes sense, doesn’t it? It also makes me think that perhaps that song was one of many reasons I fell in love with running in Edinburgh; whenever I hit one of those milestones PBs, it was on an empty stomach, a monster hangover and an all-encompassing need to knacker myself out in order to deal with everything – and if it wasn’t raining, the morning haar rolling down off the Seat would do the trick.
Also, apologies to any pedestrians along the Porty promenade that may have found themselves in the way of a greetin’ bastard singing along to one of David Hasselhoff’s greatest hits instead of breathing, punding the pavement as if they had any right to be there…
These days, I’d like to think I’ve found better ways to deal with my emotions (or, perhaps having someone teach me how to put certain things into words rather than trying to force them out in the most violent way possible had something to do with it), but very few things will feel as cathartic as a good old cry in the rain.
And it is this that I’d like to dwell on for a bit today, if you may. Because things are bound to happen. Something will remind you of something that impacted you in your youth. I came across a lyric the other day, from one of my favourite songs off of an Alanis Morisette album, that I’d never once thought about before:
And the words moved me, because my one of three reasons for still walking this earth is trying to do things that would make ‘the dreamer‘ (AKA 13yo moi) happy. Something that would make it all worthwhile. And something’s awakened this dreamer and it has left me terrified that all of my attempts to rid the world of my essence will come back to bite me on the arse. I’ve crossed off a big item on my bucket list and I find myself daring to hope it won’t be the only one.
That is all for this week. I’ll see you next Tuesday. If you made it all the way down here, here’s a special treat for you:
“So, how’s the writing going?” he says. And I had to admit that it’s not. At all. “I’ve not done anything productive since [sic]” and instantly I could hear all the excuses I’d been giving myself for the past 6 months, for how I’ve failed to do the one thing I know will give me purpose, accountability, even joy in some weird sense.
You see, when something good happens, hope starts to build. Not even that, maybe just a glimmer of hope triggers something so alien and futile as a new neural path struck in the opposite direction of all the others. So, we choose not to do the things that’ll enable such hapless and fruitless endeavours. Until the next time, of course, something unexpectedly positive in nature comes around and we’re forced to look lady luck in the eye.
After all, what’s more terrifying than going after the holy grail knowing you’ve got an actual winning chance?
If you’re taught, early on, that disappointment is inevitable due to your existence alone, you’re no doubt better off trying to shield yourself from the things that seem unequivocally and genuinely good. And your scepticism would be coming from a place of experience, that good things only happen to other people and not to you. We’re meant to contribute to the greater good by making sure others will both have and eat all of the bukkake. Or, was it cake? Who knows – not a fan of either. But the one certainty is that self-indulgence of any kind is not only wrong, but so wrong that it takes away from the so-called greater good. Which is why completing the one thing that would show others that you’re motivated by the one good thing that actually did happen, despite your lack of trying and incessant efforts to burn all bridges, becomes a reminder of how guilty you should feel for recognising even the slightest flicker of self-worth.
Why is hope such a dangerous thing, when hurt is the feeling you know best? Perhaps it’s because you already know that, when you allow yourself to feel hopeful, you set yourself up for even more chances of finding those small pockets of happiness. But not only by chance, but with actual effort. And, if that were to go away after having had the chance to get used to it, the inevitable hurt at the end of it would be such that we could not even stand to bare it. So we do our best to stop the good things from happening, just to avoid the extreme pain of potentially becoming rejected by something we actually wanted for once.
Hope and epistemology are, to me, interlinked by the fact that they both relate to expectation. The latter may be more science-based than the former, but it’s all about being able to envision realistic outcomes based on your experience. I may not be the biggest fan of Socrates’ biggest fluffer, but I do think he ‘d know exactly what I’m getting at here. Arguably, without Plato we wouldn’t even know about Socrates. Famously, Plato never spoke in his own voice in his dialogues, yet he seemed to understand the importance of his own role in bringing forth the messages of them. Double-edged swords and all that.
I’m not sure what’s brought this philosophical babble on, it might have been a discussion I had earlier today about the theory of the Id and the Ego being excuses for horrible personality traits that you don’t want to acknowledge, and I may or may not write a word or two on that soon. But not tonight. It is far too late and I seem to have decided that I’m going to try to not sabotage tomorrow for myself just yet.
I’ll see you next Tuesday. Until then, let’s all just remind ourselves that good things can happen and that it’s okay to hope – maybe not fully expect, but certainly dare to hope – for some things to work out in our favour too. And not only despite our best efforts to stop them from doing just that.
I’m not quite sure how, but we’re at the end of another month. I’ve been waiting for Summer and now it’s almost gone before I’ve fully realised we’re in it. (Shockingly, I can be more preoccupied with analysing past mistakes than living in the moment).
Last week, however, I got the chance to go to a festival I’d otherwise be reading about in the papers. Not only did I get to see a bunch of brilliant bands (Alice Cooper, Anthrax, Accept, Death to All, to name a few), but I got to leave my laptop behind and experience the outside world – turns out I’d forgotten about all of the good eggs breathing the same air as me. Now, don’t try to picture an egg breathing.
It’s funny how anything meaningful tends to turn to shit when you’re busy staring into the abyss.
Regardless, the whole experience sort of opened my eyes to how this mystical festival realm/alternate reality became a platform for reconstructing a few bridges that I’d feared were long burned beyond repair. Turns out, an apology really does go a long way. You can read more about friendship stuff in a few of my other posts, but I think this one needs to stay a little philosophical, somewhat hopeful (yet, still, consistently anxious). The lack of any rants or verbal incontinence in this post might serve as keys to its incredible shortness, but the same can be said for my return to the living (however brief it may be).
Turns out, with the likelihood of unlikely friendships, even a thistle in all its spiky glory can experience being part of the universe’s many symbioses.
See you next Tuesday. Until then, go see a gig this weekend. Do something for you and fuck everyone else (maybe not in the carnal sense, but if you do; use protection) – I find it’s when you prioritise yourself that the good stuff happens. Also, if you find yourself in the south-eastern part of Norway, you should take yourself to Rockstream festivalnear Tønsberg. It’s gonna be a good’un. And you just might see a familiar face on stage Saturday night.
Imagine for a second, that you’ve spent every second of your existence ignoring your urge to set boundaries to better serve those around you. Imagine having groomed yourself into a spineless shell of a human being by doing so, yet been able to live with yourself regardless, as you’ve convinced yourself it is the only way to go through life, only to have that belief pulled out from under you when a well-meaning stranger realises they have to inform you of your right and duty to put up a few bloody barriers where needs must. This, my friend, is where the floodgates open and the crazy pours out.
A human being is composed of a million things that can be easily broken; fingers, nails, spirit, heart … yet, only when something soulless yet visible – like a glass – breaks, we’re reminded of the complete and utter devastation something that’s been shattered into pieces leaves in its wake. In all fairness, you can both feel and see your finger breaking without the need for the bone to poke through the skin, but unless it’s completely severed from your hand, it remains attached to your body, the bone itself growing stronger and more resilient after the break. Maybe that’s why most people are willing to set themselves up for heartbreak time and time again, as if they’ve got some sort of dysphoria fetish. In comparison, you might start opting for tumblers made of metal or plastic once you’ve smashed about a dozen nice ones.
A broken glass cannot be put back together, but it can certainly be replaced by something better, new and whole. It’s rather difficult to do that with something so abstract as the personification of ones still-beating heart. Unless, of course, you invest in enough prescription drugs to turn it into an icebox. Or, you build up around it an infinite wall… with a moat… filled with ill-tempered, mutated menopausal women. A fortress both impenetrable and impossible to venture out of.
So, with this type of all-or-nothing thinking, being told you have to start setting boundaries might seem a little daunting. Especially when the people around you aren’t used to that sort of behaviour coming from their favourite doormat, or when, historically, saying the word ‘no’ in the past has met very little compassion or respect from the denied party. Enter existential crisis mode and a never-ending phase of trial and error that will surely push loved ones away and/or become the sort of thing you practise around the people you’re not afraid of pushing away.
What I mean to say is, I don’t think it’s very wise to start setting boundaries without building some confidence first. Not just in oneself, but in the whole ‘giving people the opportunity to get a sense of who you are before you’ve changed yourself into the person you know they want you to be’ thing. In a sense, not setting any boundaries where you need them is not only a disservice to yourself – it’s lying.
So, where do you start? I am in no way certified to tell anyone what to do here, but I’m at least half-decent at looking up those who do on the Internet. So, luckily for you and me, there are a lot of articles out there on the matter. The drawback, though, if you struggle with impulse control, is that there’s no quick fix. You need to be able to visualise the process – you can’t just ‘go with your gut and deal with things as and when’ or just start saying ‘no’. At least if you want to do it right and not just turn into a boundary setting machine or a NO man. I’ve linked a few articles below, for those wanting to learn more about finding out what your boundaries really are and then start setting them successfully.
Why this? Why now? Well, if the smashing of a single glass becomes your breaking point – the not so gentle reminder that you’re in the midst of a whirlwind of poor decision making because you need an excuse to feel like shit because it’s much easier to wallow than it is to thrive (fuck me, I hate that word) – it’s time to have a look at how you can help yourself before every bridge you built is burned to a crisp.
I’ll see you next Tuesday. Until then, here’s a song for those whose ‘precious illusions’ no longer work the way they did.
I’ve written about this sort of stuff before; self-sabotage and keeping good things at bay in order to protect yourself from getting your hopes inevitably crushed to tiny fragments. But as the temperature outside shoots through the roof and the sun peeks through the clouds on a more regular basis, depression starts rearing its ugly head, yet again. Which brings my thoughts to my definition of happiness. Despite knowing a lot better, I’ve always viewed it as a constant, something you become, that which makes you you – one of those annoying shiny happy people. So, naturally, I’ve done my best to stop myself from falling into the ‘happiness trap’ by planting and cultivating dumb, destructive ideas in my own head, such as ‘no happy person ever wrote a decent song’, or ‘happiness makes you ignorant to other people’s suffering’, ‘it’s better to not have known happiness at all, than to grieve its inevitable departure once you’ve fucked everything up’. You get the gist:
To me, allowing myself something that would bring even the smallest likelihood of experiencing happiness meant I’d lose my depth, my integrity, my ability to write resonant lyrics. But now I’m thinking; who the hell decided we’ve got to be so bloody deep all the bloody time? I’ll tell you who most certainly didn’t – someone in a state of happiness.
Did you ever watch that film Happiness for Beginners, where a divorce leads to the main character going on a quest – both literally and figuratively – to find what she thinks is happiness, only to encounter layers and layers of happy accidents that make up so much more than what she’d envisioned as her initial goal? A nuanced cluster of emotion, knowledge, compassion, grief and letting go of the fear of what might happen if you dared being completely true to yourself.
Fuck me, that sounded a bit pretentious, eh?
Regardless, baring your soul to yourself, for yourself, is scary as fuck! You’ve spent all this time curating different masks for every possible event, that you feel rather naked without them, and only that next level rock bottom shit can make you feel the need to do such a thing. When you’re so far below the initial rock bottom that you just cannot be bothered to keep up the charade. At least that’s what I believe to be true for myself.
And then comes the choice between finding solace (i.e. temporary lobotomy) at the bottom of a whisky bottle, or venturing into something as self-indulgent as neuro-linguistic programming – “a set of principles and techniques aimed at enhancing self-awareness, increasing confidence, building communication skills and motivating positive social actions” – after gaslighting yourself into believing you’ll be able to open yourself to such a thing. You can read more about NLP in this Psychology Today article. Turns out, the bullshit factor vaporises when you put the work in.
An article on the US National Institutes of Health referred to the treatment as “old wine in a new glass“, which I can get behind. Although not yet a recognised form of psychotherapy, NLP is very much just the re-programming/un-learning of unhelpful tactics learned over time, much akin to cognitive behavioural therapy. Although with a little less emphasis on the psychoanalysis of trauma and a little more on introducing new ideas that are, in essence, better for you long-term. Which makes me think that this whole unlearning malarkey is a little bit overrated and perhaps even – dare I say it – unnecessary. I don’t want to appear too bombastic about this: there’s no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to matters of the mind. And I’m certainly not about to knock CBT, which cam be tremendously helpful for a lot of people. But, some alternatives/variations/deviation are welcome.
So, what’s all this to do with demons and happiness? Was this header just clickbait, and there’s not even one single reference to either Charmed nor Buffy?
Well, I like to think that we’ve all got a tiny cluster of mini demons – cute wee ones, like Gizmo before his midnight feed, or, you know, Spike – living happily right up there in the prefrontal cortex of every child, but every so often, some ill-tempered adult drops a hefty scoop of angel dust-like protein powder in there, just to se what’ll happen. That’s when the shit starts to stir. For most, the good kind of childhood resilience will help take care of the aftereffects of the protein overdose. Yet, for some, the crooked kind of resilience they’ve been dealt means they just push everything down until it starts spilling out between the threadbare seams that struggle to hold them together and the demons in. One little crack turns into an explosion, where the debris and shrapnel gets sucked into the black hole left by the big boom, but the black hole is no ordinary black hole into which shit disappears.
No, sir. It’s a door to a parallel universe, where the shrapnel whittles down the debris into pointy, stabby things that – once properly sharpened – returns through its own rectum, only to stab the unsuspecting victim from the inside. This, in turn, causes a person the sort of trauma a person must go through in order to write a song like, say, Hurt. NIN or Aguilera, it doesn’t really matter. Those of us that keep feeding the demons, instead of letting them starve. The ones that need to feel like they can help the demon and not realising that, in the process, they are doing the opposite to themselves. The ones making sure everyone else’s gas oxygen mask is on before even contemplating locating one for themselves.
That’s it – it’s all demon fodder. But, hey, maybe some of the cute ones are worth it.
That’s it for today. Like always, I shall see you next Tuesday. Until then, enjoy this banger from Razorbats in the video below:
I somehow managed to throw my back out from laughing like a crazed hyena last night – at a bloody meme (or, let’s be honest, its absurdity). Needless to say, I’ve slept next to fuck all and my brain is acting very much like itself. It does what it wants.
So, it should come as no surprise, then, that the very thing that made me see the Kodak moment quality of the scenery in the post’s featured image was a song that’s been stuck in my head all day without me realising it was. I was trapped in a Buffyverse-like demonic musical with no end in sight, with every song derived from the holy grail; the song that continued to escape me, just as I had it on the tip of my tongue. Until the sun ripped through the clouds for approximately 32 seconds, creating the mirage of a slightly silvery shine to the pavement, I had no idea I’d been building up to a Victor Hugo classic.
Have you guessed it yet? Not to worry, you’ll find a link at the bottom of the post if not. Well, the link will be there regardless…
Anyway… went off on a bit of a tangent there. But, if that particular song isn’t a deluxe version of a booty call, I don’t know what is.
I’ve never been fond of metaphors. Never liked the mystery, shall we say – I preferred directness’ more bombastic quality. Yet, as I’ve grown older and more afraid of being caught in a special kind of fuck up loop from which there’s no escape (unless you fancy winding up in a parallel dimension fuck up loop bonanza), it seems I’ve started using them.
My own goddamned lyrics, but only I know the meaning of the words I didn’t dare say. This, of course, shall remain a mystery. Unless you read my book, of course.
But, yeah, back to the booty. The term booty, as we know it today – I’m not about to go into a whole thing about its origins – is synonymous to three things; a loot plundered from an enemy (as seen in numerous pirate movies), a somewhat sizeable arse or, you know, that thing. Now, the original expression is ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. I’ll argue that we can gather from any anthropology experiment, that people will have different views on what they will define as either of those three aforementioned definitions as well. In fact, I think beauty in and of itself has lost its meaning, with the constant need to push beauty standards so far up into the atmosphere that you need the help of artificial intelligence to do the airbrushing. So why not say it like it is; what might shiver your timbers may not shiver those of your neighbours.
Ooft, that was a bit of a mouthful.
What do I want from you, you may ask. Why am I ending this post before I’ve even reached a conclusion? Well, I want you to tell me what you want to read about, what you think the booty’s all about, why you think a 40yo woman can’t make herself write the word that’s fallen between the lines here…
This is a question I’ve had to ask myself these past few days, as May seemed to whizz past like a brown-dyed whirlwind, with no sign of pausing at any point – if I’d had the money to pay someone to give me a lobotomy, I likely would.
But then, out of the blue, small moments of thankfulness make themselves known in the shape of an image, a smell, a voice message from a mind reader, that all remind me that I do have things to be grateful for. And that’s why, dear reader, I felt the need to write about the good things that make life worth living today. It’ll be a very short post, but don’t let that take anything away from the fact that acknowledging random glimpses of light makes one hell of an impact on the sometimes seemingly all-encompassing darkness.
If you’ve ever been so fortunate as to experience Edinburgh in springtime, you should be able to smell the photo at the top of this post – it’s a bizarre sort of coconutty smell emanating from the “common gorse”, its bright yellow flowers lighting the hillsides of Arthur’s Seat (and my heart) on fire. My first whiff of these bad boys, I was sure I’d overexerted myself during a run and was having a stroke!
Now that I’ve reached a ripe old age where that’s a distinct possibility, I’d kill for that to be the last thing I ever smelled. Not just because I think it’s a very nice smell, but because just looking at old photos of this peculiar plant brings me back to the things I am most grateful for – friendships forged in unbreakable materials, gargantuan gigs, the break of the first post-Fringe morning, my neighbour Iain, Easter bloody Road, running alongside Porty beach, kirkyard parties, CROY, trips down south on the Caledonian Sleeper, visits from the auld country, getting to see others experience this incredible city for the first (or thousandth) time … All I need to jump into Narnia for a brief moment, is one look at a photo.
So, I suppose I’m grateful for … Thomas Wedgwood and his failures?
Either way, there’s light in the darkness and I’m off to capture some of it. To my dear pal, whose birthday I am still celebrating two days later, I hope you know that I am endlessly grateful your light stretches across oceans.
To the rest of you, I shall see you next Tuesday. Until then, you should check out The Gratitudes.
The featured image is the only photographic evidence (online) of my ever having set foot in Colorado, despite the fact that what brought me there was, by far, the coolest thing to ever happen to me at that point. Maybe even to this day. So, why didn’t I share a few of the million shots I took on that trip? Of the amazing bunch of people I spent the best part of a week with? The shows? The fucking Colorado River? Why did I decide that a wall socket with a bizarre caption was more than enough? Truth? I was terrified that my palpable uncoolness would make them look bad, should someone stumble upon my Instagram account and discover my ineptitude in not realising I was punching so far above my weight that it caused the Earth’s axis to shift at least 10 inches.
Yet, at the same time, I felt I was making a sacrifice. I was denying myself a potentially positive experience, and who knows – it could have even helped boost ticket sales or something. Whatever, I was there for the ride and it was fantastic. I can’t do much about it now, but it’s part of a pattern in me that I’d very much like to break.
The first time I decided to extract myself from a situation where I’d suffer if I did, but also if I did not, was in school. I must’ve been about 10 and I was picked to sing the lead in the school musical – a big fucking deal, of course – but my best friend made it very clear that she would no longer be mine if I didn’t somehow convince the music teacher he should offer her the gig instead. Now, this was a particularly big sell, as she had a blooming hole in her oesophagus from drinking caustic soda as a toddler, resulting in a not so lovely singing voice… but when it comes to self-deprecation, there’s none better than me at making others see things from my point of view. Needless to say, she got the part and I managed to convince myself that it had all been a ruse to make me realise I was actually less talented than a dog turd that can’t even make it all the way out of the dog’s arse and just clings to the sphincter by a threadbare sliver of sausage encased in grass and slime. Thus, I stopped playing the guitar and singing for just long enough for this prophecy to fulfil itself.
Regardless, I’ve been thinking about the sacrifices we make and what purpose they really serve, when the ones you are making the sacrifice for don’t know – or realise – that you are making one. Instead, they see how the consequences of having sacrificed your own happiness for them manifest as frowns on your face and start berating you for bringing negativity to their space – wherever that may be. And all you want to do is tell them about the sacrifice you made, why you thought it necessary and how it’s taking all of the fun out of everything now, when your efforts are not being appreciated nor acknowledged. It’s like that saying about the bear defecating in the woods; if no one sees your sacrifice, is it even there?
I don’t have the answer, other than I don’t think the people you think you’re making a sacrifice for can smell that that’s what you’re doing, unless you tell them. And that’s a terrible idea in and of itself. Behaving in a way that makes me feel as if I am making a personal sacrifice, which in turn will be detrimental to my own well-being, and pretending that it’s anything other than self-sabotage, is not very fucking sustainable if you want to live a life that’s not filled with guilt, bitterness and remorse.
Time for the self-deprecation talk to take a hike. I shall see you next Tuesday.
Oh, and since it’s my best pal’s birthday week, do something nice for yourself in her honour. Me, I’m listening to the Elton John song below:
Except, no, there’s no reason to believe the silver lining applies to genital-shaped cumulus. Cumuli? Anything I learned from my one semester of meteorology seems to have escaped my mind, not unlike the dish that ran away with the spoon. Forgive me.
The second I noticed the skies were descending upon me in the shape of a million bawbags (and just one single cock and balls) – so much so that I stopped, mid-run, to take a photo – I should have recognised it for what it was; a bad fucking omen.
They call it a relapse. I might call it a re-lapse. In judgement (as if one had the sense to make judgments at all). Either way, I say relapse is a four-letter word. Particularly as there hasn’t been any significant and/or prolonged ‘lapse’, and I believe the former requires the latter in order to simply come to be.
Now, before you get ahead of yourself there, I need you to hold your horses just a bit. We’re not talking alcohol here – although it certainly doesn’t help on the occasion it’s poured into the mix – and I’m too high strung to get much effect from any drug. No, I’m afraid we’re dealing with a much more sinister beast here…
It’s her. She’s sensed that my shoulders have come down an inch or two and she’s stepped in to make sure I burn all bridges before anything can happen.
In her defence, she’s only trying to protect me. The teenager trapped inside, too far gone to let go and far too sceptical from experience to let anyone come too close. So, when she rears her ugly head (honestly, one ugly mug is more than enough, we don’t need two), the curtains come down and our consciousness goes on holiday.
She does not give a fuck about any inconvenience caused by her micromanagement. And we suffer. Oh, we suffer.
And this is how I come to wake up on a Sunday morning, having lost approximately 43 minutes of my time between 2am and 3 the night before. Oh, and something else seemed to have gone missing; my bra. How the fuck one goes about losing one’s racerback fucking bra whilst managing to keep every other piece of clothing on is beyond me. My immediate and obvious reasoning was that I must have taken everything off in the pub in an attempt to shag some poor cunt’s husband. It’s not something that’s happened before, but one might assume one gets tired of making the same mistakes at some point, leaving no choice but to reinvent the wheel and make way for some new ones.
A full 24 hours passed, without the resurfacing of said piece of clothing. Having to monitor my blood pressure on a weekly basis, the very beepy machine told me it was about 180/95, but my fever, nausea and blurred vision had already told me that much. Related to the missing bra? Quite possibly. At least somewhat. Add in some work stuff and a few days of poor nutrition and I think we have a winner.
Regardless, I managed to find the fucker after having washed all of my washables – including my sheets and towels. What I have yet to find, though, is my dignity. Or, indeed, the courage to check to see what damage was done over the course of the weekend. Perhaps we’ll never know.
Lest we die of shame – or have another blackout – we shall see you next Tuesday. Until then, enjoy the spectacular featured image and one of the finest and bizarre tunes ever written, by the one and only Kenny Rogers, in the video below. Peace!
When a young barbarian was asked this very question, his reply was simply this;
“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women”(Conan the Barbarian, 1982)
To each their own, I suppose. Not my personal preference, but it was certainly what fuelled Conan’s fire in his quest for happiness. (Spoiler alert: I can also recall him chucking a witch into the fire, but with less success. I digress).
What brought me here today, to this particular quote, is a rather simple observation; we need to focus on the things that make life living if we want to get through the political shitstorm we’re all in at the moment, because tearing each other down isn’t solving anything (although, it might lead to the lamentation of a woman or two).
I’ll be very brief today, and perhaps uncharacteristically rantless, but I think – with a little help from our friend Conan, portrayed by the illustrious Arnold Schwarzenegger – that the shorter length might help spread the word.
A wise person once said that you cannot change another person. This is of course a truth with some modifications, because you can absolutely change someone by treating them badly, but the change achieved will likely not be what you were after. So, in order to achieve sustainable change in a controlled environment, you will need a subject who is entirely under you’re control; yourself.
In changing your own less desirable qualities, you might like yourself more. Hell, you might even inspire and motivate others to do the same. Treat others the way you’d want them to treat you; with compassion and respect. If they fail to return the favour, there’s an easy fix; cut them loose. You don’t need to waste your time and energy on the undeserving few.
I know what you’re thinking… “But, we’ve been friends for so long, I can’t give up on them“, or, “but they’re my mum, how can I let them down?” Guess what? If you’re the only one making an effort – and it’s making you feel miserable, to boot – they’re not holding onto you for your sake. You’ve got something they need. More than likely, they’ve already taken so much from you, that there’s very little left, apart from shame and codependency.
Cut them loose. Let go of any bitterness – it’s not going to make you any stronger. If anything, it’ll make you resentful and/or unable to give what you want to someone you do want to stick around.
We can’t change how others view the world, but we can try to understand why their views might differ from our own. You might even learn that they’re more enlightened than you first assumed, and that their beliefs are the only logical option for their situation – that doesn’t mean that you’re wrong. Our views, our beliefs, our truths are shaped by our experiences. Subjective truths may not always be factual, but I’d argue there is no objective truth in shared experience. You’re entitled to your opinion here, of course. This one’s mine.
My point is this:
Treat yourself and others with compassion. Sometimes showing compassion means leaving before it’s too late. Sometimes it means accepting an opinion we do not share. If we’re too focussed on who’s to blame or their shitty qualities, we’ll venture so far away from resolving the initial issue that the shitemongers will win.
Also, don’t take it upon yourself to take people down a peg as you see fit – I appreciate that most people have been raised in loving, supporting homes and communities that have convinced them that this is true for everyone, but you don’t know what sort of shit you’re stirring up within those that have experienced the opposite. They’re already down further than you can fathom and haven’t a peg to spare.
That’s it. I’ll see you next Tuesday. Until then, feast your eyes upon the glorious display of wholesomeness below.
Gonzo With the Wind 