The Capacity to Love

Came across this on Facebook today, thought I would share because it couldn't be more true. 

Various Valuable Links

7 Things to Remember When You Think You're Not Good Enough
An important list that condenses the types of things I have been trying to talk about in this blog.

You're Probably Not Really a Nice Guy
A video I believe sets the record straight on "friendzoning" and discussing the "nice guy/asshole" boxes society stuffs boys into. Pay attention at 4:35

10 Habits of People Who Follow Their Dreams
A list of mind opening habits that may help you reach your dreams and goals by stepping out of your own way.

15 tips for Empaths
A little help for those of us who feel everything and everyone right to the core of our being.

Signs We Are Being Used for Sex
A useful article for those of us who find our own self love and self worth damaged by the people we spend our time around.

We Are Not Here to Fix Each Other
Another article for the incredibly empathetic, and those of use who base our own self worth on healing the severely damaged.

Learn.

I'm sorry I've been so inactive on here lately, but trust that I have not been inactive in the journey.

It's so hard to put all that I have learned and all that has happened in to words at the start, but once I get going it comes easier. That is one point that really has been driven home as of late. If you stand in your own way, you really never will get anywhere. If you step out, and most importantly step FORWARD on to your path, there is nothing you cannot do and no one who can stop you. The only way another person will ever be able to stand in your way is if you let them make you believe they can.

This world is full of distractions, and I think a lot of the purpose of these distractions is to keep us all from figuring that out. Can you imagine if we had a world full of people, particularly young, informed, intelligent people, who were completely aware of their own power and knew exactly how to use it? I use the word power very intentionally. I selected it over strength because they are very different, yet not unrelated ideas, Strength can be applied to anything, whereas power has a very particular link to free will. Strength is essential. you must have the strength to face things, to accomplish things, both mentally and physically. Until you realize your own power, you will never realize the full potential of your own strength. I can pull a rock up a hill all day long for anyone who asks me to. I can be motivated by my love, my fear, or my respect for them. However, if I knew that getting that rock to the top of that hill would get me closer to achieving my own dreams, that rock would move ever so much faster.

As I was saying about distractions. This world is full of things to take your mind away from itself. We are surrounded by advertisements trying to convince us that our bodies, our possessions, and our beauty is not enough and that we need to spend money to fix these fabricated inadequacies in our lives. That brings us to money, and working to get it. A startling portion of our young people sell off massive portions of their lives at what is literally called minimum wage. If you are living off of minimum wage, you are probably working more than 40 hours a week. You may be working 6-7 days a week, and in the little time off you do have, all of that working has not left you with enough money to provide your own basic needs and enjoy yourself. Many of us are caught in a cycle where we spend all of our time at jobs we dislike to go home to a place we dislike and eat food that is bad for us because it's all we can afford. A lot of us get more jobs, work more to try and break out of this cycle, work more hours so we can afford that better apartment or something we saw in an advertisement that is going to make our lives better. When all someone does is work and panic and focus on moneymoneymoney so they can eat and live and maybe have a little scoop of happiness on top, when exactly do they have time to think and realize, not only their full potential, but how royally fucked our system is? The answer is they don't, and whether society has engineered this to be so, or whether it is the result of being so focused on the moment that we couldn't see the big picture going on around us, that is how it is.

I am seeing a beautiful bloom of people trying to break out of this cycle, taking off in a myriad of paths to find their definition of better.

I see people going to school. Learning is beautiful. Specialized, higher learning is beautiful too! Sadly we then face debt, and the sad reality that in this world, when you chase your dream of learning everything about something you love, you better make sure that "something" is valuable to society. Society doesn't always value the artists or the musicians. Society doesn't always value the insatiable learners that are archeologists and scientists. Society calls our kind fools, dreamers, and unless you can convince society and the people around you otherwise or find some other way out, you will fall right back into the pattern of working to live that devolves quickly into living to work.  Many of us will pay dearly for the audacity of a dream.

I see people toss off the burden of society and completely leave it. There is a growing culture of young people who travel, relying on their skills, the cooperation and kindness of other people, and the will of the universe to exist. These people are largely silent cyber-wise, for obvious reasons, so those who exist in the land of screens don't hear from their minds. Step away from the screen. Talk to someone completely different from you, face to face, and really hear what they say. Ponder it, learn from it, but try not to judge it, at least until you've done the other two.

This is my latest challenge. Observe the world yourself. See what kinds of filters you see it through. Do you see the world the way someone else has told you to see it? Are things like your own fear or prejudice keeping you away from things or thoughts? Are your filters keeping you safe or keeping you insulated? I don't know the answers to these questions, and if you've already answered them in your head mere seconds after reading the words, you don't either.

Go think. GO think and learn and observe both alone and by talking to people. Talk to people you know and love, talk to people you have never talked to before. Talk to street musicians, politicians, parents, children, friends, actors, peers, supervisors, EVERYONE. Hear them, hear the way they see life, and see what they say. Make your priority the intake of information. Observe people, observe nature, observe the world. Observe the sky. Observe the water. Observe in such a way that you are completely separate, and observe without judgment or fear. LEARN.

Your thoughts and opinions are important and need to be shared, but that is true of everyone on this planet. Do you know why that is true? Because we are made to learn. So learn.

Response From a Reader

Reader:

"I just want to let you know that you've inspired me. I've watched you change through your posts and I love the way you try to change the way you look at things. Ya, things can still suck sometimes, but you've done a lot to make yourself happy and I'm slowly learning to do that too. I'm going to try that love poem to myself thing that you did. Thank you for showing me how I can help myself.

Life is really scary sometimes and i just have been needing a boost. I have to fight with myself to try to avoid anxiety attacks and depression. You've inspired me time and time again and I really want to change like that. Maybe all I needed was a mentally distorted buddy... So we could maintain sanity together"

This response means so much to me. it feels wonderful to know that I'm helping someone make it through, and gives me hope that I'm helping more than just her.

I know this isn't easy for anyone. It's not easy for me either, but I promise you, once this stuff really starts sinking in, life is so much more beautiful and easier to get through.

Backstepping

I'm hurting a lot today, and feeling very down on myself. I know I'm not alone.

These two songs really help me, maybe they'll help you.

Perfect by P!nk

Love Me by Katy Perry

I'm sorry I haven't updated much. As I said this journey is a hard one and mine is not finished. I am currently having a really hard time dealing with a breakup, and a lot of my old issues about myself have flared up pretty badly.

I think I am beautiful inside and out. My mind and heart fascinate and delight me, because they are a universe to explore in themselves. Their abilities astound me, like they are separate beings I don't even know all about. I worry that I am too intense, too odd to ever be able to connect with another person whole enough to love me the way I love.

Physical beauty isn't supposed to be important but we focus a lot on it, so it becomes that way. I am anorexic, and though I am even on the low end of a healthy weight for my frame I still find myself picking apart what I consider to be extra pounds. My acne and heavy acne scarring upsets me a lot. I feel like my hair is too thin. Everything I've already been through in my short life has already started to wrinkle my skin and grey my hair. I worry that all of these imperfections will make me too imperfect to be loved romantically.

These things may honestly be true, as every fear and insecurity I have listed has its origin, has its evidence where it got in the way of something, the moment a lover called attention to it.

I'm trying to make myself ok with being by myself because I may be all I ever have. I also know that every relationship I have until I reach that peace will be tinged with at least a little bit of desperation to not end up alone, and that will always add something untrue to whatever love I create.

My mission is to reach a level of peace that allows me to be happy with whatever my fate becomes. I have not come as far as I thought I had, but I have still learned.

Why Love Yourself? Because You're a Rebel

Society doesn't want you to feel good about yourself. Society wants you to feel crappy all the time so that you'll spend all of your money on their beauty products and treatments for the rest of your life. These products are advertised like they'll make you finally-FINALLY-feel good about yourself, yet when you examine the ads themselves, their very nature is designed to make the viewer feel inadequate. I'm not saying it's wrong to wear makeup and enjoy physical beauty, I'm saying that our obsession with physical beauty over all else, in addition to this pervading thought that only one person or type can be beautiful and all others are inadequate is tearing us as a nation and as the human race apart.

If you're distracted by feeling terrible about yourself and obsessively feeding your money into this cycle, you aren't realizing that society has made you a prisoner to its own idea of perfection. You are complacent, you are padding the pockets of the puppetmasters, and you are not a threat to this system. Some people are so brainwashed that they impose this ideal, not only upon themselves, but upon their peers, often in the form of mockery and judgement.

So, you rebel you, with all of your high notions about how the world should be, how government should work, and how people should act, how about you start changing things with yourself? Focus inward, stop spending so much energy on your outward beauty, and stop comparing yourself to what the media says you have to compare yourself to.

You have beauty already. Focus on it and love it.

Expecting Respect

When you're moving through a journey of learning to love and respect yourself, you are going to reach the point where you are treating, thinking about, and carrying yourself in a completely different way than you used to. This is going to affect how people treat you and think about you.

In my personal journey, the changes have been drastic. I now act in such a way that is respectful to myself, and people around me, especially new people I meet, treat me with the same respect. Let me provide an example. One of the ways I used to try and get people to like me was to be an extremely sexual person, ie talk about it a lot, put on a front of being "unashamed" of my sex life and acting in such a way that I thought made me seem sexually liberated. I was just painting myself as trashy and desperate.

Now hear me out, because I can already hear the hackles of women's rights raising. There's nothing wrong with having lots of sex, no matter what your gender is. There's no reason to be ashamed of having sex just because it is sex. In my case however, I was having sex for the wrong reasons. I was using it as a bargaining chip for other people's affections (pssssst, that doesn't ever really work FYI) and having sex that made me feel dirty and sad instead of bringing me happiness, like it's supposed to.

I now am not open about my own sexual history or sexuality. It's no one's business but mine and not something to be used to impress anyone. I generally watch what I say and pay more attention to the crowd I am around and the way I want them to treat me. the result has been that I am viewed as a person who deserves respect, and I get it.

I have always been a person who deserved respect. My new view on life on myself didn't earn me that right, I've always had it, and so have you. The thing is I didn't believe it and didn't act like it. I was a person who treated myself like trash and spent a lot of her time in social situations putting people in their place and not understanding why people were always crossing lines with me instead of being polite. Now, I walk in the room a lady who obviously respects myself and those I am around either follow suit or are no longer around me.

Treat others the way you want to be treated, but don't forget to treat yourself that way too. Lead by example.