The currents guide and influence my path, but I can row and steer in any direction. And if I choose, I can perceive life as an ocean instead of a river. But at that point, words fail to describe what I’m talking about. Even “transcendence” is a verbal abstraction, barely touching on what it implies.
Dirty Sci-Fi Buddha 
Respect the currents and navigate accordingly.
It will never be that proverbial ‘smooth sailing’ but in brief insight into those forces which work around us can be a bit like looking up at a start filled sky, overwhelming.
Wishing you good journeys.
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Indeed! A lot of smoothness also lies in perception, and is better judged with the passage of time and not in the heat of the moment. Wishing you good journeys as well!
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Thank you. See you on the other side of the Universe😀
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🙂
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Yell plot twist.
Each chapter is building up to something. Or so I tell myself. The hard part is not being able to skip forward. Meantime. Trust the journey.
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Like Ogg, my head hurts.
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Thank you 💜 I appreciate you and your very gracious decluttering campaign. You rock in my book for that alone! I have never looked at thinking about the river of life as an ocean…are you saying with this that a person’s perspective can be expanded?
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No worries! Looks like some more recent comments got purged–they show up in my admin comments section, but not on the page where they’re posted. Nevertheless, I replied to them all in the admin section, but I couldn’t like them from there. Hopefully, the replies make their way to you.
Yeah, I think perspective inevitably expands, especially after we die. How much that happens is a function of our focus and allowance. I also believe (without any proof) that there’s some kind of existential accounting at the end of a universal cycle where everything comes back together no matter what, and then re-expands into something novel and unexplored. From an individual personal perspective, I think it’s possible to throw a tantrum all the way up until that point, but it will make for an unpleasant chain of experiences, which, considering the premise that I’m free enough to wander around and create my own experiential narratives, is a strong understatement.
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Your replies did, and I responded briefly, in case they made it back to your admin page. I know it’s a lot of comment threads, you don’t have to reply to any of those if you don’t want to maintain that many threads even if they did.
I have noticed that a tantrum even about negative happenings just isn’t productive, and if I notice I’m really struggling with something, I try to shift out of the negativity as soon as I can to whatever degree I can. That being said, I’ve internally thrown a few tantrums. Sometimes life can just pile on and I think it’s normal to have a moment where we look up at the universe and say “really?” I think I appreciated the reminder to keep working on expanding my perspective when I can. I still don’t focus much on trying to figure out what I think about what happens after we die and beyond because I’m too busy putting out fires at my very in the moment feet. But maybe some day…I do agree though, that I think perspective does expand after we die. That is something that definitely resonates with me.
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I think the tantrums are part of our design; it’s all well and good to say you don’t like something in theory, but to really clarify and define perspective, there needs to be a certain degree of visceral experience. That being said, I feel like most of us throw far too many tantrums and dwell overly long on the negative, and sometimes throw tantrums over nonissues we have grown into problems through our imaginations and focus. There’s a danger there of being judgmental and denying the validity of a tantrum or demonizing it, but I’m more of the opinion that none of that is necerssary, that it’s simply an incentive to not beat myself up for throwing a tantrum, and being sensitive enough to move on from them as soon as my emotions tell me that’s where the relief lies.
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Well, although I try to be as positive as I can I certainly know I have been guilty of growing a non-issue into a problem through imagination and focus. I do also think sometimes the difficult experiences provide clarity and help a person recognize important truths about themselves and the circumstances they are in. But I think it takes a willingness to step back from the trauma or the bad luck or the “oops I really messed this up” moment or whatever and ask questions about “what can this teach me?” I think in the midst of certain experiences, that can be insanely difficult to do until a period of time has passed. And I think perhaps one reason it’s so easy to grow something into something it may not be, at least in regards to interpersonal matters, is that we’ve all had moments I think where we kept a portion of what we were genuinely thinking and feeling back from our responses to others, so it’s easy to look at someone else’s response and say “was that everything?” and then just fill in the blanks too much. And sometimes with events we are remembering, our mind fills in blanks using pattern recognition, etc…and it can be a lot for anyone person to tame those kinds of reactions or habitual responses or neurological ruts. That in and of itself takes focus and practice I think. It’s easy to judge sometimes, but it’s good to remember why we shouldn’t (namely, we all struggle with something).
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I think particularly as children, we’re kind of designed to experience more general dissatisfaction to shape our perspective and eventual life path. It’s not really a fully formed concept in my head yet, but it kind of plays into my idea of a fair and benevolent universe where we choose the video game we’re going to play during one of our specific lives. A kid is pretty powerless for a good chunk of time, so in order for there to be some kind of meaning and fairness to that, I feel like I kind of have to default to the premise that a lot of those impositions in early life are ways to clarify future desires and passions, and set up some constraints and preferences for the chosen video game. Kids obviously can experience horrific trauma so that gets a little touchy as an issue, and there has to be care taken to be clear that it doesn’t overstep into victim-blaming, but I don’t think there’s another way to compile a fair and benevolent universe without ultimately accepting the premise that we choose the video game we make of our lives. The other way–randomness or external villainy that tyrannically dictates an individual’s life–might erase any potential for victim-blaming, but it also sets up an inherently cruel existence, where one can do one’s utmost and be as virtuous as possible but still be punished (randomness), or one must live their entire life fearing for their safety, ensuring peace-eating paranoia is always prudent (the possibility of unstoppable imposition by external villainy) Because of this, I’ve actually begun to think of death as a pleasant reset, and not something to be inherently demonized or afraid of (we all die anyway, so that makes for a near-constant state of demonization and fear of death, if we’re trying to be compassionate toward everyone, or by necessity we must ignore the humanity in large chunks of society, so we can remain unaffected by the deaths of strangers). I once read about a lady that got attacked by a bear, suffered life threatening injuries, and couldn’t shake the trauma, so she killed herself ten years afterward. I could paint her as weak or I could paint the universe as cruel. I concluded that I’d rather see it as a reset where she for whatever reason couldn’t bear the remainder of that particular video game she’d originally chosen, and decided to move on to something else.
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I just spent 10 minutes typing out well thought out, meaningful response to this just to have my computer wipe it out When I hit submit because the Wi-Fi router went down 😫 So, unfortunately have a medical appointment I have to be at so I’m about to be slightly less well thought out as I regurgitate some of what I said, and I beg your pardon in advance. I have discovered that sometimes even gently and very well treated children can find things to criticize or sometimes even feel intense to satisfaction about. Some of that is cured when the realities of adulting sets in, and even more of that is cured when the realities of parenting set in for those who choose to do that. It is true that some people have very legitimate reasons for the criticism via trauma or hurts or neglect or whatever. Sometimes that can propel people to move forward, sometimes it just becomes a playbook that people repeat. I do not have answers that I 100% standby. I love and appreciate that you care about fairness and not victim blaming. Life can be very hard. There are moments where the idea that I could have chosen to go through difficult things before I came here resonates with me, and other times where I think there is no way I would have chosen in advance to go through something in particular. I think When someone makes the choice to force what you would consider a “game over” moment in life, It is better to hold a space for the humanity of a person and recognize the intense amount of pain they had to have been into bring them to that. I know it is not so cut and dry for loved ones of someone who has committed suicide, and some will feel judgment or even anger on top of the grief and loss for many reasons. For me personally, I have people who rely on me so I am always going to want to fight to stay here as long as possible even if things are really hard. And one thing I have definitely learned from my life is that I can survive pretty hard things, I’ve done it, So even in the midst of something hard I know that something good is can follow it. But not everybody thinks that way, and not everybody’s neurology is even capable of processing life that way. I think it is hard, And as I said I don’t have answers. I feel like this deserved the thought of my original answer, but we’re going to have to make do with my current answer… Thanks for chatting with me and take care of yourself 😊 Ari
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It definitely was a long process for me to come to the belief that we choose our circumstances, and it was done pretty grudgingly, if I had to describe it. At one point, I subscribed to the idea that we didn’t have free will (that was when I noticed the very deterministic effect our values and self-image had on our actions), mostly because I felt it was the most compassionate and benevolent way to frame existence, since there would really be no blame to pass around. Then I came to the conclusion there’s no way to determine if we have free will or not, or how much we have, but as long as there’s a possibility we have even a little, we should act as if we have some agency, because otherwise we’d waste it, so until it was definitively proven or disproven, we should assume we have it so we don’t waste it if it’s there even in the slightest degree. Then I later concluded I’d rather not live in a cruel universe, and so I began subscribing to a set of premises that would ensure the universe wasn’t cruel. There’s immense short-term problems with the idea that we have a greater aspect that chooses our childhood experiences, but it’s really the only way I can reconcile our existence with benevolence and fairness (added in with some other premises like reincarnation), which makes it worth living for me. It helps that there’s good anecdotal support if you know where to look for it, but it’s really a personal choice for me. I don’t see the point in constantly looking over my shoulder and living in a neverending state of vigilance and fear. If it’s ever definitively proven that that is how I am supposed to live, due to a cruelly designed existence, whether that arises from lack of choice or random malevolence, I’d rather not stick around. I can understand, however, the repulsion that comes from the idea that someone might choose their own misfortune as a child, even if done from a greater intangible aspect. It really dances on the line of the most horrific victim-blaming possible. It’s probably why I’m interested in seemingly strong evidence of a larger body of individuality than what is readily apparent, like in Tyler Henry’s stuff. I just have no interest in striving and suffering to prevent the imposition of a cruel existence, and possibly lucking out in the end by dying without too much misfortune but having paid for that with a lifetime of vigilance, correlated with varying degrees of stress, paranoia, and whatever it takes to not get randomly screwed along the way to my death.
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Again, I give you kudos for the sensitivity and awareness you show about the difficulties that could be involved for some in even hearing the idea that a part of us chose to experience certain things. I have heard that concept voiced before by some who didn’t even seem to recognize, much less openly acknowledge, the implicit difficulties that could be there for a person in accepting that as a belief. I also always really respect that you admit that it was a personal choice for you, the way you have come to think about life, etc. I don’t mean that in any slighting way, I have a great deal of respect for the awareness that you have. I can concede the fairness of your points, and I also really love that you are concerned about seeing fairness and a lack of cruelty in existence. There are many difficult things to reconcile in life when it comes to that, and I don’t have the answers to many things, thus it would be especially foolish for me personally to even pretend to a confidence I lack in describing any thoughts I may personally have about that at this time. I do think having an answer a person feels settled with can bring a certain amount of peace, so I think certainly it’s a journey through the thoughts that is worth having if one has the time to really focus on it. I think there is much to think about in your statement about the stress and paranoia that can come with wanting to avoid the seemingly random bits of whatever negative (be it minor or major) that can happen along the way. So much of certain things are out of a person’s control. Definitely it is a high quality tool in the happiness kit that can allow a person not to worry so much about those things. So for you then, is it fully your belief system on the nature of life that helps to give you that bit of relaxation from being stressed so much by the potential negatives, or are there other components?
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I have heard it said before here and there without any supportive reasoning, but it was only when I pondered it myself with the requirement that existence be fair and benevolent–combined with the crystallizing belief that reincarnation, consciousness affecting matter, and consciousness as the fundamental base of the existence–that the idea became inescapable for me. The second/third-hand anecdotal evidence, combined with the consistency I saw from firsthand observations, led me to believe there isn’t a conceptual alternative. I do believe there is allowance for randomness, but in a restricted fashion. By that I mean that if someone is keyed into a positive existential frequency, then positive things will unfold, although it may be in an unexpected (random) way, but the overall result will remain positive. Similarly, I believe that randomness exists when someone consistently keys into a negative state of being; the result may be unpredictable in specificity, but predictable in negative impact. In the short term, this may not be apparent and easily disproven, but with sufficient time, it is my belief that a positive focus will shape a positive series of events. I also believe it is weighted toward the positive, that even in negative focus and ensuing events, existence drops hints and encouragements to surrender to the positive, and crafts opportunities to turn a shorter term negative into a longer term positive.
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I must say, I enjoy the depth of thought you put into these matters. I also must own that on days like today, where yesterday was pushing so many stress buttons on my system, I had to imbibe some caffeine and wait for it to hit my system before I could rally enough brain cells to respond adequately to your depth of thought. And, because I have a tow truck driver that just called while I was starting to type this that is going to be here in a few minutes to pick up our brand new car which turned into a brick in a Costco parking lot yesterday, I am going to have to be short. I think there is truth about what you say in focus. I think sometimes it’s hard, because when a person has a lot of negative things happening, it just can become a spiral. And even sometimes when there’s just a flood of negative things you weren’t expecting and no amount of positivity seems to stop it…sometimes just surrendering to that being a part of life feels like one of the only options. Last night? Even my inner sunflower burst into tears after my sister-in-law got us home. I think it can be hard to maintain positivity at all times, especially in the face of a lot of seemingly random negative happenings, but trying to find the positivity as quickly as possible does seem to be the best way forward to having the happiest result with all of that…
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Those days are tough, when the rug gets yanked out from under you and turns all the positivity switches off and replaces it with dread and hopelessness. In those instances, it’s helpful for me to acknowledge it and sit with it for a bit, so my brain can honor the magnitude of it and start to process it. I remember when I was a dog walker in San Francisco I felt something like that after a dog ran away into the busy city, and I spent the next few hours with some others looking for him. The only relief I got was abiding with the sentiment that life was fucked, that was the only way I could keep functioning and prevent myself from blinding myself with furious denial or anger at me or the dog. But we eventually found him and all turned out okay. The key distinction for me is to point my attention in the most positive direction, evidenced by relief if I’m in a negative state, not necessarily positivity itself. The cork will float back to the surface, but it’s a matter of not pushing it under for me, if that makes sense.
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I can see why the dog getting loose and lost would be extra stressful. It’s bad enough when the pet in question is yours, but even worse when it’s somebody else’s and it involves all the additional aspects that come with that. Yeah, they are tough. Not really interested in bombing you with the list of things that’s been parading through my life right now, but it’s been a lot. It’s an active process every day to choose to orient myself back towards the light and allowing myself to float up to the surface because that’s where I want to be. I agree acknowledging and honoring the feeling is important, sometimes I can move past it quicker. Only a very quick couple of sobs on Saturday. Some days it’s several minutes. Most days I don’t waste my time crying, because usually it helps me more to do something else…but I don’t have a perfect grip on all of that. Sometimes when it is a long stretch of one thing after another, on the one hand it can kind of numb you to it and make it easier to just power through it. On the other hand, spending too much time in the emotional funk from each even can make it harder and feel worse I’ve found. For me it’s more useful to acknowledge and move on as quickly as I can. Sometimes I’m able to move on quicker than others, but that’s usually my goal, is not to stay in an emotional state that could become poisonous if I overstay. I thinking pointing to positivity is important. So other than acknowledging, it sounds like for you your approach towards moving towards positivity is to just not force it and relax and let the movement in that direction happen? Please feel free to correct me if I’ve misunderstood, etc. Wishing you a wonderful day 🙂 Ari
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Yes, everything is dependent on me not forcing anything, and to remain sensitive and open enough to feel for relief (when I’m negative) and accelerated optimism (when I’m positive). It’s all dependent on the idea that the default mode is positivity, and that I don’t need to actively move toward it, but rather loosen up enough to let it re-weave itself into being. I remember the first time I experimented with this was in 2019, when I was walking dogs in the mist through the park and I was feeling pretty low. Up until then, I had believed everything was a function of my individual willpower and effort. But I was dog tired of feeling negative, so I clearly remember having an internal dialogue where I genuinely decided to give the idea that the universe was default positive a try, by just zoning out and not trying to fight negativity or force positivity. And it worked! It was a small epiphany, and there’s deeper and deeper levels of realization and integration, but I can confidently say that it’s the way for me. Maybe not for others, but it fits with my understanding of how a benevolent universe would work, and also my inclinations.
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When I think about the way you connect to the positivity in that sense, as an expression of relaxing into the natural state of the universe, I think for me how I would see it in the context of my circumstances goes as follows: I am pretty sensitive to the moods and energy of the people around me. If the people around me are struggling intensely with negativity or anything that is otherwise internally dark for them, I have to actively work to put on some sort of emotional life jacket (aka effort of force to reconnect to the positivity I want). If I am also struggling myself in my own right internally because of circumstances that have weighed down my heart, and the people around me are also struggling, and I don’t make an active effort, I won’t pop back up to the surface I don’t think. My good friend Nancy, her husband is retired military and he tried to help me improve my swimming once. What he said to me about that was that I was a natural sinker. Bummer right? But it is what it is. In life, for some time, my inner everything prefers to orient towards hope for almost everything it can. Realism dictates that hope is not possible in every circumstance and I know that, but positivity is my preferred state at this point even when things seem scary for hard or difficult to surmount. Sometimes though I definitely feel like I am in emotional water I am going to sink in so to speak and I have to take an active effort to put me in alignment with where I need to be to prevent that from happening. But I respect your process and I do find myself thinking about it sometimes because it does seem to be that sometimes I am more uptight about some things than I need to be.
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Something that was weird and unsettling for me at first was when I began paying more attention to my internal state, I would start interacting with certain negative people less, and some eventually just phased out of my life. I felt conflicted at first, thinking I owed them a debt of companionship or attention, but then I later came to accept that they had the right to choose their own resonance, and if there’s was dissonant with mine, circumstances would conspire to minimize interaction. Conversely, I found that if they were moving into the same perspective as me, whether that was me being more negative and moving toward them, them being more positive and moving toward me, or any number of combinations of those, we would come into contact with increasing frequency. I mentioned in a recent post that one of my friends tried to fly to me from out of the country, but despite having access to personal funds that could buy the ticket several times over and access to my credit card, the transaction failed to process multiple times. Once again, these things aren’t scientifically provable, but the anecdotes have become too personally relevant for me to ignore. So even though it is a work in progress, I am settling more and more into the acceptance that I will rendezvous with who I need to when our resonance allows for it, and that I won’t serve them by hanging around in a lower resonance and trying to pull them up. If I want to help them, it’s better to set the example and perhaps inspire them to raise their own resonance. I won’t turn down a request for help, but at the same time, I won’t compromise my internal integrity. That, I have come to believe, is the truest source of power and harmony, and the only way to channel synchronicity and abundance as coincidence.
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To a certain extent, that is a luxury of bachelorhood, and I don’t mean that to dismiss what you’ve said. Let us use a hypothetical example where a parent resonates positive and a child resonates very negative. May not be able to pick or choose for quite some time how much time, interaction, etc is involved there. Minimally, regardless of what a parent feels, according to the law a parent does owe that kind of support to a child regardless. And for me, as a parent, any child of mine…they are my child, no matter what their differences or struggles, no matter how old they become. So I will walk with them in every way when they need me to, even if I don’t agree with their perspective or my resonance is in a very different place. But with friendship relationships? I can see what you are saying, for sure about the resonance, though I can be friends with someone certainly who has a different perspective about things. My friends or acquaintances don’t owe me anything of themselves ever. Anything I gave of myself was a gift that I don’t require a return on. I think sometimes it can be a fine balance when there is someone in your life who resonates very negative, because sometimes for them just me being me and having my own more positive take feels like an unspoken criticism, a rejection of their world view, and can sometimes even be downright annoying to them. But I do not let that stop me from trying to continue along my path of choosing hope and working towards being the most positive version of myself possible overall.
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To reconcile my view, it requires acceptance of scientifically unprovable premises, specifically the ability to shape coincidence and seemingly unrelated external influences. But, although it may sound like a nonscientific copout, I choose to believe that is possible, due to the existential biases I have accepted and the required follow-on supporting frameworks (such as reincarnation). I can only offer anecdotal response, which doesn’t really fit into formal deduction and is even further from the idea of data-driven evidence. Nonetheless, I’ll offer an anecdotal exception with my own father, who left when I was ten for Korea. I always knew I was never meant to live there, for inarticulable reasons as a youth (later, I found out that it’s pretty much the opposite of my personal values, stiflingly conformist and unthinkingly loyal to organizational entities). Nonetheless, I was offered a choice at ten by my mother and father to stay with her or go with him, an extremely unusual thing to offer to a ten year old by Korean War boomers. I chose to stay, and not only did he not offer support, he tried to get a settlement from my mom (Korean courts historically favor the male, hopefully it’s not that way anymore). I believe these unexpected turns of events, and indeed all coincidence and exception, is attributable to personal resonance. Debate-wise, that statement leaves me extremely exposed and is arguable from a multitude of angles, but I choose to be stubborn and stand by it until reality is explainable from a metaphysical level, which would be the only and truly definitive way to wipe out every iota of doubt concerning my views. Also, my ex’s brother was given every opportunity growing up, all the extracurriculars, attention, presence at sports games, etc. etc. Yet he barely passed high school and fell into a dangerous lifestyle as soon as he graduated. I know it tore my ex’s dad up, but anecdotally, I believe it’s demonstrative of my belief that resonance will find a way to circumvent any check in the box, lawful, familial, or otherwise, regardless of how improbably or fantastic the method may be. Once again, I know I’m debating with two anecdotes, and I also know that my ultimate defense, if we began a data-driven exchange, would be that no one knows what reality truly is, and how it works and iterates from its fundamental core. Ultimately, it comes down to my unsupportable belief that there is always an abundance of choice, even if that means the deciding factors will have to rely on seeming coincidence.
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LOL, well, being forewarned of your planned persistence, certainly I won’t debate you 😉 Ok, I wasn’t going to anyways. That sounds like a very difficult position to be put in as a 10 year old! I’m about to give my reason for not arguing with you, but I want to be clear I believe what you described was much more difficult on the emotional level. I think sometimes a person can know, just know beyond logic or reason that something is or isn’t right for them…in my early 20’s, somebody that I was very emotionally attached to asked me to move to where he was with the implication of seeing where our relationship could go. And I meditated about it, and felt like it just wasn’t the right situation for me at that time. So I agree sometimes people can just feel something about a situation and know it beyond logic (because I really was very emotionally attached to that person at the time I made that decision), so I wouldn’t be arguing with you anyways. That being said, I think the point I was making was that for me, as a parent, I am not walking away from any child of mine who wants me there even if they are a black hole of negativity. As long as they want me there, I will be there, though boundaries even with that are of course appropriate depending on the circumstances. I do think people have choices and sometimes they waste them on things that drive them away from happiness, etc. But I think it’s easy to armchair analyze what someone has done when you haven’t walked in their shoes. I’ve had plenty of people tell me what they would have done if they had lived my childhood. But they didn’t live it, so I personally think they don’t really know for sure…some fires must be walked through before you know how it would forge you.
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I respect that. I believe it’s the same mentality my mom has with me and my brother. I think it’s causing her drama now, however, because my brother told her he would stay for one year at her house but it’s going on 4, and he’s about to turn 36. They’ve had a lot of fights about it, and I told her I’m ready to step in, but having had extensive experience trying to argue my brother into doing something smarter or less harmful, I told her there’s no use arguing further unless she’s ready to kick him out. She’s vacillated on that because of her motherly instincts, acknowledging he’s acting spoiled and entitled (which curiously, he wasn’t), and that kicking him out will ultimately help him, but unable to do it because she reflexively feels like she’d be failing him, which we’ve discussed in-depth, to the point where she knows she wouldn’t. Awhile ago, I did some introspection on exactly what family meant for me, and I came to the conclusion that if any of my family did something egregiously horrible, then I would side with the law, and if the law for some reason wouldn’t function (hypothetically, like in a Mad Max style apocalypse or something), then I would have to stop them myself, with lethal force if necessary. I’m purposefully avoiding dramatic language because I feel like an emotional appeal via horror-porn description or macho vigilante tough talk distracts from my point, which is that I probably put less weight on family and friend status than most folks, and more weight on their individual values and actions resulting from them. Due to some unpleasant experiences, I am of the opinion that business with family and friends either should not be conducted, or a much higher degree of vetting and safeguards should be put in place, because the relationship is now also at risk, along with time and resources. Generally, I believe it’s better just to keep things on pleasant terms and minimize the chances for them to disappoint me as something besides an enjoyable person to be around. That’s probably contributed to me not wanting kids. The fulfillment I’d gain from that level of involvement wouldn’t be enough to power me through the harder times.
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And I likewise respect your understanding of what you feel comfortable with and why you have chosen the path for yourself that you have. Parenting isn’t everyone’s journey, and I sincerely don’t mean that to judge. I think the housing situation is complicated. I am a believer in being as positive and optimistic as possible, but the truth is we as an economy don’t have unlimited resources, unlimited business opportunities (because the economy can only support businesses to the degree that people have money to spend) for every person to afford what is currently happening in the housing market. I know people who have had to build an alliance of sorts with other family members to be able to afford houses. And these are not people working minimum wage jobs, the couple in question both have Masters Degrees and jobs that 4 years ago would have allowed them to be doing well in this area. But now? Not so much. When I was a teenager, I could work a minimum wage job and afford an apartment in an area that wasn’t the greatest, but it wasn’t the worst. I was living off of Ramen and one meal a day, but I could still do it. Now? Not so much, in my area, a person needs to be pulling in a minimum of $150K a year if they want to stay afloat, but that still might not be enough for them to afford most houses out here. Hence the alliance I mentioned where they had to ask a 3rd family member to live with them and be on the mortgage as an income source.
As a parent, I can understand why your mom feels torn about it. I would rather see my kiddo living with me than on the streets unless they were doing something super illegal. Want them to have a job? Yes. Want them to contribute to all of the expenses and upkeep? Yes. But you know, I’ve been kicked out of my parent’s house before, and it wasn’t a great time. I was much younger than your brother of course, and the reason I got kicked out sounds like it was different. I didn’t agree to help pay for a new engine on the step-father’s car. I wasn’t driving it, didn’t know how to drive at the time actually, didn’t have a license, and was mostly taking the bus everywhere, and I was trying to save up money for schooling, other things. But I was also paying them rent and buying my own food/clothes/personal care items from the age of 17 when I got my first cashiering job. But I can also understand how it would be concerning to have a child staying when they could be making other moves to be independent. I can see so many sides to this type of situation, and I am in no way trying to give an opinion on your mother/brother’s situation. I have no place to do so. I just know for me personally, it would be a complicated decision.
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Well, as far as my brother, he’s had a masters in media arts since 2016. TLDR: he’s had close to four years of living with my mom to at least demonstrate good faith in his intention to move out after one year, but has done the opposite. When he graduated, he began trumpeting through interpretive online art (social media posts) he’d collapse capitalism, fight communism (yes, contradictory, I know), solve climate crisis, reform the educations system, the list goes on. In order to accommodate this, he would take temp freelance jobs (extremely low and unstable income) so he could engage in fruitless philosophical discussions, essentially critiquing and shaming (finding problem with) people who disagreed with his stances. We left him alone until he moved in with my mom and failed to maintain her standards of living and cleanliness. None of us care about his grandiose BS, but he uses it to justify the fact that he doesn’t even apply for jobs, much less try to get interviews. He also claims he doesn’t give a fuck about where he lives, that he could move a few hundred miles away to a much cheaper place, but he never follows through on it. She’s even gone so far as to make him sign contracts six months out stating that he would move out, but he always takes advantage of her with evasion and lies. His latest avoidance tactic is crashing at other friends’ pads in another state or traveling abroad (his maxed out card collection bills are another source of stress when she sees them in the mail). Bottom line is, yes, housing is a tricky situation, but he acts in bad faith all throughout, not demonstrating any initiative, intention, or appreciation for his imposition on other peoples’ benefit of a doubt and graciousness.
It’s actually been an enlightening lesson for me. I’ll give family and friends the benefit of a doubt, but if they abuse it, I will draw an absolute firm boundary with them, so I don’t have to ever be in a situation like my moms, or some of the ones I found myself in prior with my brother. Family and friends to me, are reasons why I should be extra diligent in demonstrating and reciprocating grace, not the other way around. If one of them abuses that, then it’s going to be disproportionately harder for them to ever get that opportunity again, simply because I don’t want the emotional and relational investment to suffer along with the material. My brother knows–before, he used to ask for collaborations and business opportunities. I tried a few, he demonstrated similar bad faith, so instead I started saying no and he’d flat out look like I slapped him. When he asked why, I at first tried to explain, then I realized he was feeding off the argument, so then I’d just say I don’t want to explain why. After a bit, he stopped asking. I believe he understands why, but at this point, I don’t care.
As far as personal anecdotal evidence, it has reinforced my worldview even more. His strategy is to focus on problems, articulate why people should be disproportionately pissed or disgusted by this or that issue, then bray it out to all and sundry. Then he’d label his audience as a problem for not listening, understanding, and enacting his course of recommended action. I saw him focus constantly on problems, to encountering them nonstop, to becoming one himself. It’s another reinforcement as to why I’d rather focus on solutions–I don’t want to amplify, refine, and live that energy of something always going wrong and then eventually becoming the thing that always goes wrong.
Lastly, it hammered home that being a family/friend simply gives one an extra benefit of doubt that they can live up to or not. Much like veterans or high school quarterbacks that use their meaningless status to brag or try and take advantage of peoples’ admiration and good will, being family or friend to me means that in personal interactions, more is required, not less. And if there is failure after benefit of a doubt is given, it is extra important to articulate why that happened and what remedies or corrective measures are being taken, and how they will help. If someone lies or obfuscates like my brother, then, as I flat-out said, I might help you in an emergency to say that I’ve fulfilled my familial duty, but I don’t like you, I don’t consider you a good person or a friend. Even with emergencies, if they were to do something vile like abuse a child or something as egregious, then any leeway they’d be given as a family or friend would immediately vanish. That relationship, in my opinion, is something to be lived up to, not something to use as a crutch or an excuse.
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Ok, I’m going to try not to word bomb this, because while there’s a lot I want to say, I have some public therapy stuff I need to get out on that’s more temperature sensitive. I don’t think a degree is as important in some things as a skill set maybe and having the right attitude. I only scraped together an associates, and I can tell you that it could be considered as useful as toilet paper because none of my positions was it useful for obtaining, and I didn’t even have it for most of them. I mean, I got hired in Clinical Outcomes for the company I was working for just because Kelly (my first boss in that area) had worked with me when I was the second/third shift Admitting Services Supervisor and had respect for how I did my job and my skill set. Had nothing to do with my qualifications to actually be in clinical outcomes, just saying. Because I really wasn’t qualified for that. Also just saying. But I did my job well enough (read as I always do my best to exceed anybody’s expectations if they are paying me) that when she left the company, she tried to take me with her, and reached out a couple of times after that. I really wish I could have taken her up on her offers, but I was having a pregnancy with complications, and then after that…yeah. We’ve already talked about the prevailing view in our former church that the woman should stay home with the kiddos.
I think pretty much everyone has lied at some point, whether intentionally or not. Sometimes people’s memories play tricks on them and they think they are saying something truthful and maybe it was a bit different. I think it’s a little bit harder for me to see one lie and come up with not a good person math for me personally, but I also really don’t like being lied to, so I can appreciate that it isn’t something you like to deal with and I respect that.
It sounds like a complicated situation with your brother, as family situations often are. You know, I think involving the police with family members sounds so simple. You know, I’ve called the police on my step-father before. I saw everything from being taken to a domestic violence shelter to an officer threatening to take me a generally rule-abiding nearly straight A student to Durango (when I was teenager, it was a jail for those under 18) because he believed my step-father’s version of a story. He can be very charismatic when he wants to be. I have a high level of respect for police officers, I loved my great-uncle and he was one, but I will also say it’s like any job and there are people doing it right and people who are not. My mom never wanted to press charges, and so she didn’t, even when we were harmed. She wouldn’t even press charges when he tried to strangle her long after I had moved out. Aside from the statute of limitations issue, when I left I was just trying to heal and hold it together. I don’t think I could have handled the “he said/she said” battle in court at that time and it was nowhere near in my mind, I was just trying to survive and move forward in healthy ways. Now I could handle that kind of battle if I had to (and I certainly would press charges and see it through for my children or myself for anything happening at present), but again, statute of limitations. And, he’s the only reason right now my mother isn’t living on the streets. And she wants to be with him. Sometimes, it’s complicated. He left scars on my body, and I don’t feel they deserve a place in my life after everything that happened, but right now he doesn’t have anybody else to hurt but her, and she’s not advocating for herself in that and I don’t have legal standing to press charges on her behalf, even for the attempted strangling issue. So I can also understand why sometimes a person would just choose to let something go.
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I’m not sure where you got the one lie from in my comment, but I guess I wasn’t clear: lying is what he does, in everything from casual conversation to discussion of anything substantive. One time we asked him about it and he said it was part of being an artist, and we were all too tired of his BS to pursue that line of questioning. The driving motivation that has emerged and that we all agree on is that he wants attention, even if it’s negative, as he will happily argue everything into a lengthy verbal stalemate. As far as the good person thing, I think I’ve interacted with folks who have seen his behavior up close for so long that I take it for granted other people just know, so I sometimes forget to elaborate. The judgment that he is morally lacking came from the early days of COVID, when he refused to take any precautions despite living with my retirement-age mom. I’m sure you remember that at the time, no one knew what the deal was with the virus, hospitals were filling up, and for a little while everyone agreed on staying inside, to the point where it was briefly bipartisan. My brother refused to stop socializing, argued endlessly about it, and didn’t make any allowance for the fact that he was living with my elderly mom, even to the point where if he had casual work to do he would still hunt out communal places with wifi–he wasn’t even doing it for the social benefit, he just likes background noise while he’s working on his BS attention-pandering projects. That was his level of disregard–the most trivial of comforts over risking the health of my mom, who was in a risky demographic. At that point, I realized he was so ruled by his fears and aversions that he would behave immorally. Now, I don’t actually think he’s a bad person; in fact, I still skype with him and my mom every two weeks, and we laugh together and converse. But as soon as he tries to sucker me in with art or philosophy or collaboration stuff, I say no and I refuse to explain why. Once again, this is years of imposition, broken promises, deception, and lack of any corrective action, show of good faith, or remorse. It doesn’t seem to come across well in text, as I seem to have evoked a bit of a both-sides stance, but living it for years on end is hard to convey, as it sounds like you know from certain long-term toxic arrangements; it’s probably hard to explain the breadth of that over time and probably hard to explain the seemingly endless willful ignorance and dismissal.
Like I said, however, it was a valuable lesson. I learned something similar with my friend who uses politics to spew constant negativity; I tried to engage him on it when he was living with me, and despite him believing the same things I do in terms of consciousness affecting reality, his negative bias made him adopt the line of thought that we must summon negativity against the ruling negative elite, inflict violence and humiliation, and only then can we be positive. I reminded him that I believed my years-long focus on negativity almost drove me to kill myself, to which he responded, “maybe you should’ve.” I was taken aback, thought about it for a day, then sat him down for a conversation where I said he could no longer live with me and I probably wouldn’t talk to him for a lengthy period of time, if ever again. He claimed not to remember saying it, even though seeming genuinely apologetic about it, but it doesn’t matter. If existence hits me over the head with a sign like that, I see it as a choice: heed the sign, or dishonor/disrespect my own worth by letting it continue, and simultaneously dishonor/disrespect the other party by letting them be something undesirable without informing them. As with my brother, I still talk to this guy, I still joke with him and laugh. But when he asked me if he could stay with me for a medical emergency, I stated he could do so for the emergency portion only. The follow-on portion, which was cosmetic, was out of the question, as the scheduling, being a non-emergency, might not have been immediately accommodating in the emergency room, and he might have ended up lounging around my house waiting for cosmetic procedures. So I said emergency and that’s it. The point of all that is that if I am given a sign to draw boundaries, I will do so, and make it so I have a chance to be the best of myself to that person, and they can do the same to me. So I keep my brother and this friend in a place where we can still talk and joke, but needn’t potentially be enemies.
That’s not a judgment on others. I actually drew a similar boundary with my mom, where I told her I’ve tried to argue my brother into doing the right thing, but the next step is kicking him out, and if she chose to do that, then I would assist with phone calls, admin, and miscellaneous support 100%. If she doesn’t, then that’s her choice. She’s an adult with her own power of perspective, and how she chooses to live that is fully her own choice. If someone chooses to live with that, there’s nothing I can do, they have their own agency. And regardless of what happens during life, death will dissolve that problem eventually. My personal view is that if I feel trapped by circumstance or obligation, I’m going to be looking for opportunities to improve my position. Even if I can only do a little, or if all I can do is ponder and focus on better possibilities, I’m going to do what I can. Much like I don’t believe I came into existence to suffer for a religious checklist, I don’t believe I exist to set aside my enjoyment and fulfillment for societal obligations and formalized virtue. That’s just me, though. I’m not going to try and force or be pushy to my mom or anyone else concerning how they want to live. If they ask, I’ll give my advice. If they want help, I’m going to assume they’re in a place to move forward, and I’ll gladly help out, until they repeatedly show bad faith and/or contrary intention.
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You know, I could probably go through where I got the impression from, but I think it’s clear I misunderstood. Truth is, I enjoy chatting with you and often do the best I can to bring as much of my focus on what you are saying even when I am trying to rush to do something else that needs to get done, and I was definitely rushing yesterday and I clearly misunderstood something. Whether I did or not, I wouldn’t want you to feel judged. I was sharing my thoughts, but I can also understand how that can come across as the smack of judgement. So, my sincerest apologies all the way around!
I can see how the mask thing would have been upsetting. I was reading a fair bit from epidemiologists and virologists studying COVID early on because I was trying to keep as many of my son’s therapy programs in tact as possible with both he and I being in higher risk categories. And you know what? All of our exposures early on were from therapists, but I was still successful enough to keep from catching any hint of COVID until after I ahd already been fully vaccinated. But it was stressful all that cleaning, masking, diligence, and asking for mask wearing from others. I even watched materials from RN’s or others who had strategies for making masks with the same filtration as an N95, because early in that’s what I was having to do because of market availability. And I had some very uncomfortable run-ins with loved ones who didn’t want to wear masks in all environments where risk was an element, and I felt many things after those encounters, I don’t suppose it needs to be gone into here, but I can understand why you would be upset about that. Yeah. It’s hard when it’s out of control and can negatively impact someone you love.
And I think you are right, sometimes boundaries do need to be set. And I really love what you said about if you felt trapped by your circumstances or obligations, you’d be doing anything you could to improve things just one little bit. That’s where I’m at and what I’ve been doing. I know people would say it could have been done sooner by putting Tony in a facility or a behavior center, but it would emotionally kill me to have done that if another way was open to me, and it was. So I took it. And it’s not what everybody do, but it’s what I chose to do because I can feel what is in Tony and he’s worth it. I would have done it for Hannah too if she needed it. And it is what it is. I’m not dead yet, loosing a few years to do this this way wasn’t really a loss, it was an investment on a future where my son will be able to participate with his family and in the community in ways he otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.
Thank you for taking the time to call me out on my misunderstanding in such a respectful way, again, I appreciate your time and that you chat with me. Take good care of yourself! I need to stop Tony from raiding the pantry and we need to go to some work outside his new school before it gets too hot! ❤ Ari
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No worries, I enjoy chatting with you as well! I don’t really talk about my brother with people who aren’t familiar with the history, so it’s easy for me to forget that other people aren’t intimately familiar with the details, since they haven’t lived it for years. I’m pretty sure you’ve encountered the same thing when relating some of your experiences, where someone’s response puzzled you and you realized oh yeah, they aren’t intimately familiar with everything I’ve gone through because they weren’t there, so you have to explain stuff that feels self-evident because you’ve dealt with it for years.
I was much more emotionally invested in the issue as recently as a few years ago, but it was good clarification in that I realized I can’t help my mom if she doesn’t want it. I told her to kick my brother out during COVID if he didn’t straighten up, I harangued him with logic and threats, but I came to the conclusion that if she wasn’t willing to draw a firm boundary, I wouldn’t have the grounds to help her reinforce it. I’d simply be an over-aggressive tyrannical presence who was forcing people to do things they weren’t committed to for their “own best interest.” To me, that has extremely limited validity, in some cases where mortal danger is not just a possibility, but imminent, present, and bearing down on you, or perhaps in some cases with a parent-child relationship. Even in those cases, it’s best to explain beforehand if possible the reasoning behind any drastic actions.
Anyways, the important thing was I realized my mom and my brother are both their own persons, fully grown, and they are free to engage in their own mistakes, whether those lead to death or not. If I were to assume a caretaker role, there would have to be an imminent, time-sensitive threat or it would have to be agreed on beforehand, at which point I’d be empowered to step in and take care of things. I’m not here to nag people into doing what I think is the right thing, nor am I here to try and convince or incept other people with my idea of the right thing. Every one is an individual perspective for a reason, so they can explore their individuality and live their own unique narrative. Due to my belief in the ironic reciprocity of coincidence, I’m not going to trample on that individuality, because I don’t want people trampling on mine. I don’t advocate for selfishness–abusing others to get ahead–because of my belief in ironic reciprocal coincidence and also because from an expanded perspective, I feel like that’s kind of like one hand smashing the other, it hurts the body regardless, but I also believe we are inevitably tied to an individual perspective of self, and we have to honor the fact that we operate from that and perceive from it. Maybe self-oriented would be a better phrase. That’s congruent with my beliefs that societal expectations and obstacles are games and opportunities I have the pleasure of navigating and leveraging; they’re not condemnations or curses which I have to internally agonize over and use as a reason to wallow in spite and negativity.
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I have definitely, definitely been in situations where I realized I was making statements without enough context provided for the person to fully understand my perspective or why I was saying what I did because I had just assumed that the other person was aware of the same things/history or had the same interpretation of the words, etc. Or that they remembered something we both experienced, because pre-POTS me was often in the place of remembering a shared experience that the other person didn’t. That’s returning more and more, so pros and cons with that… There’s plenty of different shades of meaning people give to the same words based on their own experiences or how they learned the word in the first place. I again, thank you for your graciousness and awareness.
I often feel that way about certain situations. As long as it isn’t impacting my health, I have to realize even when it can impact me in other ways because of the love I have for that individual, I can’t help someone who has no interest in helping themselves. That desire must be within them already. Sometimes as a parent, you have to nag. Sometimes as a parent, you have to do lots of things even if the kiddo doesn’t want to help themselves, but there has to be a moment of awareness about what is the responsibility of an individual for themselves once they are adults and there has to be a certain amount of letting go. I struggled more with that with my Granny, after my brother was killed, it broke her emotionally. She lived a few more years, but couldn’t live by herself anymore. And I would go and visit her at the VA facilities she was in, and I would have “discussions” with nurses who let her have ice cream or other things she shouldn’t have on her diabetic diet because she was so important to me, I just wanted to micromanage everything I could so that she could be there longer. One of the nurses pointed out to me that at her age, she’d earned the right to make those decisions for herself, she knew the risks (and definitely did) and that she deserved to happy in any way she could. I honestly still didn’t let go internally, but I outwardly stopped trying to wrangle the staff into following their dietary guidelines. My grandmother, I tell you she could sweettalk people when she wanted something, they really never should have caved to her on that, lol. I can laugh about it now, at the time I wasn’t so amused. I was disgruntled with everybody involved, though I did internalize enough of what the nurse and my grandmother were saying to stop interfering, but I recognize why it can also be harder for people to let go both as parents and as family member who cares and loves.
I need to get an answer off to Margie and rush off to some therapy stuff…always it seems there is more I can say, I’m going to visit your other comment briefly, but thankfully for everybody I have got places I need to be so I don’t ramble even more! Take good care of yourself 😀
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I fit the nagging and good for your own benefit stuff of being a parent in the context of a personal calling. If it truly is a personal calling, I think that any unpleasant minutiae tends to either not register or process quickly (unless there’s other things frazzling me) kind of like how I don’t mind working out or driving to the gym to stay in shape. Or how I don’t mind sitting for long periods in front of a screen writing a story. I’ve worked around plenty of folks who didn’t mind silliness, inefficiency, or degradation because it was simply part of a mission they believed in. Then, when it was no longer productive or healthy to continue propagating that mission, things that previously rolled off their back would become excruciating for them. You seem built to care for your kids for the long haul, so I feel like you would be more resilient with kid-related adversities, or maybe not even see them as an adversity where someone like me wouldn’t be able to stop stewing over it. I’m actually grateful this was realized in the case of my dad, because I don’t think he or I would have enjoyed growing up with each other; he had stuff to do in Korea, and I was destined to be shaped by things here. I think moving toward a calling or life’s purpose is somewhat like plugging into an existential recharger, where inspiration, energy, synchronicity, and virtues like patience and grace flow from that orientation. That’s not to say it’s always pleasant–I’ve cursed the amazon formatting gods plenty of times–but I do believe there is a deep-down rightness and affirmation that lets us know we’re on the right track, that in our most reflective moments, we can be at peace with our decisions, and if we were to die at any of those particular moments, maybe there would be stuff we’d want to finish, but we’d be satisfied with the accounting and reconciliation thus far.
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It is true that parenting is part of my calling in life and a significant portion of the journey I am on here. That being said, sometimes you never know how much something can get under your skin Even if it is part of your calling until you actually experience it. But, I also do recognize it comes with the territory for what I am doing, and I have a level of peace with it. Because it is also been one of the greatest joys in my life, being able to have my children. I think it is pretty common when people decide they want to be parents that they are envisioning a very specific set of circumstances and outcomes. The reality is that any number of circumstances and outcomes are possible, and having an awareness of that can help a parent adjust to anything whether it is or isn’t their calling. I also wholeheartedly agree with the idea you express that wants something is no longer a part of someone’s journey, it can feel really aversive to them. That’s pretty much how I feel about most organized religions at this point. I also agree that there is a sense beyond reason that can help us understand what our path is for any given moment. There is more I could say, but right now I am trying to navigate speech therapy and respond, and so far the therapy is winning in terms of sustained focus 😅😳 Tony can smell distraction a mile away and will take advantage of it every time. But my schedule is tight for most of the day, so I am making do with any availability I have. And just as a heads up, because I like to be someone who communicates clearly about what a person can expect for me, very soon I am going to have to transition when I respond to much later in the day because of my required presence at Tony’s school. Sometimes it may be closer to evening, and if all crap hits the fan maybe at the very end of the day.
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No worries on the response time. I keep it to once a day, because as entitled as it may sound, responding all the time in the early days when I started social media was messing with my mental health, specifically starting to feel manic to the point where I’d wake up in the dead of night with a ton of anxiety over nothing in particular
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No, it doesn’t sound entitled. Honestly, part of the reason I still don’t have social media is that it would give me panic attacks trying to respond to more than a few people in a timely manner under my current circumstances. So I limit the number of people I consistently interact with on-line right now because I don’t want to start conversations I don’t have the time or the emotional energy to sustain. Because I do feel the urge to respond within a certain time frame unless something happens and I either don’t notice or completely space it. That’s also the same reason I’m not subscribed to a bunch of blogs, I would feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of reading. Once I get to the point where there’s not as intense therapy or caregiving needs? I might decide to be more involved on-line. But for right now, it’s just not a priority because it doesn’t provide enough benefit to compensate for the stress it would cause to maintain.
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Yeah, honestly I don’t see how influencers do it. I’m saying that as someone who gave large-scale interaction a try, and quickly realized it’s not for me. I’ve also become aware of a related dynamic when it comes to texting; apparently, it’s weird to respond right away. But then there’s this unread text sitting on the phone, or maybe it’s read and now you have to remember that it hasn’t been answered, so it’s lurking in the back of your minor to-do list. Add in the lesser volume of context, and I’ve concluded that it’s something we as a society are still figuring out. Most want to treat it as an electronic times square, where it’s a reductive dynamic of good ideas will outweigh the bad, but there’s big differences in information richness, troll culture, ability to hold folks accountable on the spot, and so on and so forth. I’m sure it’ll work out, but there definitely has to be a willingness for individuals to lay down boundaries.
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I respond to things either when I am able or as the potential urgency of the situation might require. That to me is the guide I must follow rather than some arbitrary determination of response time etiquette. Of course, sometimes I am way too wordy, and that is definitely something I should be more mindful of. I do think boundaries are important, but to me, one of the things about any sort of social media is the potential for distortion of what is really going on versus what is presented, who a person is on-line versus who they are in real life. I enjoy chatting with the people I chat with on-line- and thank you again for chatting with me 😀 – but I always feel a greater degree of trust in my relationships where the person is an actual physical and verifiable presence in my life. To me, social media can be too much about gaining popularity, and as a society we validate that by having some employers using how many followers/subscribers a person has as a determining factor for a job offer in a field not related to social media, communication, or PR. Like any body else, I enjoy being accepted by others, but popularity is far too fickle for me to chase after it.
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I’m not sure why you apologize for being too wordy, other than maybe people tune out sometimes and your message loses impact? I just see it as someone who wants to express themselves. Yes, I agree that measuring someone’s worth by popularity isn’t generally healthy. I get why it’s used as a metric, because it’s so easily converted into money and opportunities, and I think there are genuinely folks who are excited by playing that game, but I get a petty high school vibe off it. I suspect it’s a generative factor behind a decent amount of Hollywood craziness, because the industry is based on popularity. From what I’ve heard, the actor’s auditioning process leads to giant insecurity complexes on top of personalities that are already insecure and trend narcissistic or sociopathic, so that leads to some really strange power dynamics and rationalizations for anything that results.
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Well, the amount of detail I can feel necessary to provide can feel suffocating to some. I am aware and honest enough to realize that although there are only a couple of people I get that wordy with on-line, probably there could be any number of visitors to your blog that could have looked at the length of some of my responses and thought to themselves, “Dear God, please don’t let this woman visit my blog!” Lol. It is what it is and there’s nothing wrong with them feeling that way. But most places I visit, I recognize that and don’t get so wordy, but because you expressed an acceptance of it a few times in the past it causes me to relax a bit more…but sometimes I still feel bad because I recognize I can make the eyes of some glaze over and roll into the backs of their heads. And I think you are right about social media popularity being used as a metric for money earning potential, etc. but because of the high school vibe you mentioned, I’m still not so fond of that aspect.
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It’s a little trickier talking in person. During biweekly video chats with my family, my mom will literally go on for ten or 15 minutes and we’ll all just let her, and she’ll apologize afterward for going on a monologue. It’s all right–she feels the need to speak, and she knows that if she wants a dialogue, that she’s not setting herself up for success. There’s much more of a rhythmic give and take when talking in real time that I’m more cognizant of while it’s happening. Since I read a lot as a kid, I think I’m able to easily digest a lot of text, which means I’m fine with long statements and responses. I always felt a little weird by text and email etiquette, but I imagine especially with emails where people get hundreds a day, it’s important to keep things shorter and sweeter.
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I think it is important to have a give and take in any conversation, and I definitely try to be better about it for in-person conversations, but sometimes I will notice I have verbally word-bombed on-and-on just because my thoughts are marching pretty rapidly on something and I had a lot I wanted to say about it. I have found that especially if I am talking with someone who has significant struggles with anxiety, they will have a much higher level of sensitivity to and intolerance of a longer explanation for certain things. I am a talker, and so it is important for me to be aware of all the ways that can come across in any circumstance. I think with e-mails, it depends. I’ve done some serious word bombs there too- especially if I’m sleep deprived and upset. If it is something that is related to a therapy or educational situation for one of my kiddos and it requires a lot of explanation or detail, yeah, there too. Because for our son, whose needs are very specialized, the more details people have, the better able they are to provide the appropriate supports. But otherwise, I agree generally the shorter the better.
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I’ve found some helpful instruments are TLDRs, where I state the conclusion at the beginning and guide the knowledge with supporting facts, then the same with practicalities, where once the goal is understood, the strategy is outlined, then tactics are agreed upon. Also, interactive questioning and questions that verify understanding seem to help in those situations. My goal in something similar would not be to express myself, but empower the other party to honor my intent on a practical level. Admittedly, it’s not my thing; I think I’m fairly decent at it, but it doesn’t energize me or engage me, so unless it’s a matter of practical necessity, it’s not something I’d seek out.
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I think stating a conclusion/summary first and interactive questions are great strategies! Sometimes though, that doesn’t land well with all therapists or educational professionals, who would much rather be given the details and then come up with how they think it should be interpreted. Because of course, I’ve given a conclusion that was different from a particular therapist and seen how well that went over, lol. Not that it’s really all that funny how that went down. And, for my anxious loved ones, they want the concluding statement only. I suppose we all have different wants for every situation, but especially communication. I think based on my experiences as a parent on a kiddo with this level of need, it’s not something that should or can always be done, leaving people to honor my intent. Because they may not, i.e. a previous disability support services coordinator who said (in front of a therapist, BTW, so even though I would have loved a recording, a witness *is* the next best thing) that he didn’t think my son really needed all of this therapy, he thought he needed a facility and a psych evaluation.
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It sounds like a synchronistic match, you and your son! You get the fulfillment from caring for him, inspiration for expanding on your personal care-centered calling, and refinement of expression so that you can also expand on his growth and capabilities.
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I think Tony was meant to come to us. I have a mix of traits that involves a pretty tenacious level of persistence when I believe it is warranted, the ability to be intensely patient, creativity, detail-oriented, and the willingness to fight in whatever manner is necessary to protect his interests. Andy loves him completely and still feels proud to call him a son. I think many men would not based on my own personal observations and what has been related to me by others.
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I’m glad! I love to hear when fortune gives people a positive break and finds them a good fit for their desires and needs!
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* “intense dissatisfaction” about when it comes to children and the way they can feel about their parents. I noticed that when the comment posted, if there’s any other craziness in the proofreading from dictating into the microphone I will try to fix it tomorrow…
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Nice
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Ok, so we’re having a post school walk french fries/coffee/cookie while practicing functional sitting and dining skills at a McDonald’s, and I realized I left a couple things out of my comment that I had wanted in there. I know I am wordy to the point of being obnoxious to some (as I said, I tend to be very aware and real about myself) but I felt it was really important to add that I can understand why you would be upset about the other circumstances you discussed also. The statement from the friend? No words. And that’s probably for the best, lol. I think you are still trying to be there for people who have maybe not shown up as their best selves for you, and I honor that.
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You know what’s weird, is that I wasn’t upset when it happened. I was upset later, when I was in bed thinking about letting it go without saying anything. I took that as a strong existential signal that I needed to have a chat with him and make my position clear. Once I had that chat, I felt buoyant and light. I was resigned to never hearing from him again, but after a year he called me up drunk and my gut wasn’t saying no, so I had a fun chat with him and we began chatting regularly again. However, two years later, when he was having medical issues and the prospect of him staying long term came up, my gut said absolutely not, so that was where I drew another firm boundary. Also, the universe wouldn’t even let him stay for his emergency issues, which I was willing to accommodate him on as far as lodging–despite having enough money to buy multiple plane tickets to my place, his card got denied, then I gave him my card where the charge went through twice, but somehow the plane ticket couldn’t get processed. To me, it fed into my belief that our resonances were too far off for us to physically come together. It also fed into my belief that resonance is what is important, to listen to my gut and that someone like him, who even though espouses that he wants to help people out and maintain positivity, will encounter problem after problem by constantly focusing on problems, then eventually become one himself. Same thing with my brother. All that is anecdotally based, but it checks out with my beliefs about being so free we can trap ourselves, being able to influence externalities through internal perception, which ties into my greater belief that we can never be definitively trapped and how we thus exist in a greater benevolence, not an arbitrary malice or randomness that will sometimes equate to the same thing.
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Sometimes it is like that for me too, that something doesn’t upset me in the moment but it does later when I am reflecting on it and processing it more fully. I think life can be tricky, because there have been points where I have had so many problems coming at me it’s hard not to be focusing on them…so what I try to do is shift my focus to finding solutions or work around or whatever when that is the case. It is good for me to have reminders sometimes about the importance of orienting to positivity as quickly as possible so that I don’t start inviting more, so I like to sometimes listen or read things that help me keep that somewhere in my focus. A long time ago in our former church, they did an object lesson that I think was very relevant to many situations. We were asked to look around the room and notice everything of a certain color. Then we were told to close our eyes, and tell how many items had a different color. That resonated with me more strongly than most anything else that came from those experiences. Sometimes our focus determines what we see, not necessarily everything that was there. In life, much of the time there are positives and negatives. Focus more on one, and that is what you will see. Even in the midst of circumstances that skew more positive or more negative.
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Ironically, I, who freely admits to pushing the edge of preachiness and annoyance and positivity, have been struggling with anger and frustration lately regarding some first world problems. It is much like writing, in that the basics and fundamentals remain the same or change very little, but I need to adjust those for new specifics and not just disingenuously rest my laurels on articulated principles and logical justification. By that I mean I can’t just apply an intellectual framework of rationalization of why everything will be okay, of how all in existence either matters equally or is equally insignificant so I might as well not stress, blah-blibbity-blah-blah-blah. All that is an outgrowth of a deeper emotional shift, where I must FEEL the transcendence within the present moment. That, from my experience, is what gives rise to all the neat sayings and cognitive justifications. Anyways, for some as naturally oriented toward intellect as me, it is definitely a more novel way to be. Much more effective, I have to say, than browbeating myself with justification after justification, quote after quote, remedy after remedy (built on the justification of this worked in the past for me so it has to work now, which often results in more frustration because it doesn’t work as well as it did or it’s not working in the exact manner it did). I’m right there with Jon in my books, learning how to feel my way into perspective and realizations.
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I get the anger and the frustration about the first world problems. Happens to me too, even a self-lit sunflower can feel weeds sucking at her roots or shadows trying to steal her light. For me sometimes The emotions I am feeling both from myself and whatever is whirling towards me from the environment around me can become a barrier of sorts between my connection to a more positive state. Sometimes it helps me get to the point where I can feel it to read reminders from the words of others or even remind myself of the things I have already experienced to be true for me personally, because then I can feel the truth of that resonating within me and it can help much calm the storm of other distractions.
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For me it’s really an exercise in not trying to force a rationalization into my perspective. Sometimes, the idea of something being my destiny has been a great source of comfort and peace. Other times, I’m absolutely not in the mood to entertain that, and I can’t help thinking that if this is my destiny, it sucks balls and I hate it. Most of the time, futility and the overwhelming evidence of our physical insignificance brings me comfort, but there’s some occasions where it doesn’t. I have had a growing suspicion that feelings are like muscles, that you can poke around for what is the most positive resonance available at the time, sync with that, entertain the thoughts that arise from that harmony, then move to something more positive once the tension eases, then repeat that process all the way to a positive, lighter more carefree state (maybe not in practicality, but internally). That’s the most apparent model of emotional management to me thus far…
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Yeah…I totally, toooooottttaaaallllyyyy resonate with what you said about how sometimes something can comfort one when it feels like destiny or unavoidable, and other times not so much. Yep. Get it. I also really like your analogy to muscles (if you use something, the responses times and strength improve emotionally also) and your way of describing moving up the emotional latter. For me, sometimes it’s complicated and might involve things like too much sugar impacting my mood, too much tryptophan making me feel weighed down emotionally and physically more groggy, sometimes it’s more than just what I am thinking that has an impact on how I am feeling, but I do think where I am thinking is always an important place to start.
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For me, I have found that thought and resonance is the base of where to start, and will inspire me on how to adjust for externalities. I use to think the exact opposite, that micromanaging supplements/caffeine/habits would lead to mastery over internal state of mind, but I think I was fortunate in realizing that’s not the case. It’d be kind of like if psychedelics or religion contained the answers to life. If that was the case, everyone’s life quest would be simple, boring, and uninspired, in that they would be obligated to find the correct religion and follow it to a tee or take the right psychedelic. I’ve taken psychedelics and had good, unpleasant, and absolutely negligible experiences, and it largely depended on my state of mind. That’s probably where my focus on intuition and being present crystallized–when I tried to micromanage myself through external forces, only to find out how incomplete that was as a prioritized approach.
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I think sometimes there are differences in individual circumstances that can come into play here. The first time I managed to land on a doctor’s radar for having dips in blood sugar was after a comprehensive metabolic panel, and I didn’t realize I was supposed to be fasting. I had a cheese sandwich and a soda somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour before the test, and my blood sugar was below normal. When we were discussing the results, my doctor at the time asked me, “you were fasting, right?” And I said, “no, I didn’t know I was supposed to be.” When my body is having a lower blood sugar moment, my hands can start to shake, I can get super irritable (emphasis on the super)…and trust me, that definitely impacts how I feel and react to things, and it’s immediately resolved once my system gets some simple sugars or starts breaking down some carbs. I’ve gotten to the point where I can generally restrain outward reactions when I am having that type of situation now, but when I was younger I definitely came across as cranky/hangry until the system started feeling the sugar. When I was younger, I would get tunnel vision and other symptoms too, but I honestly make sure I eat really regularly most of the time, so I don’t have those types of symptoms any more.
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Being hangry was definitely a big part of my youth, lol! When I was younger, I thought that willpower and strategy (logical, evidence-based countermeasures) were how I controlled mood and fulfillment, but I’ve gravitated more towards accepting deeper and deeper levels of the idea that consciousness is the fundamental determinant behind reality. When I first tried fasting, I was in a low-key state of panic for a bit because it felt like something was trying to gnaw its way out of my belly, but after a bit, I realized of course that wasn’t the case, that I had enough energy stored throughout as muscle and fat for anything long-term, and that it wasn’t the hardcore activity I initially made it out to be. If anything, I came to view it as lazy (not in a judgmental sense), because I was actually doing less in that I didn’t have to worry about what to eat or prepare any of it, and I had more time to do whatever I wanted. That was a bit disappointing–I was thinking about it at the time as the next level in being hardcore, lol! I could go on with the placebo effect, yogis taking massive amounts of LSD and being unaffected, Wim Hof, people dying from a provably false external condition which they believed was true, etc. etc. I think it’s easy to get too demanding of oneself with all that stuff, however (if they can do it, I better be able to as well!) so I just focus on staying positive, believing things will fall into place, and letting my intuition have its say, which may mean eating, supplements, naps, or not.
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Well, I think this is a tricky one, because I want to acknowledge that for individuals with certain medical conditions, their bodies can’t tolerate certain things well, but I also think it is true that a person can become so convinced of their ability to heal that seemingly miraculous things can happen and conditions can either dramatically improve or resolve. At the same time, plenty of people who profess to have faith in God’s ability to heal them never have that experience. I do think belief (absolute belief) and consciousness are quite important in the reality a person experiences. I prefer to orient to positivity or finding something I can do to make something better than resigning myself to despair in any situation, but I still haven’t managed to completely positive-away the hangry, LOL! But maybe someday…
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It’s why I use the term resonance. Belief holds too much of a cognitive, ego-individual connotation for me. Vibration and frequency, while I think are accurate in many respects (the wave presence of energy that is simply higher or lower in occurrence) holds too much new agey connotation for me. Resonance has a nested implication of coming into harmony with something, and it doesn’t seem to have accumulated any problematic connotations as of yet. In Zac Efron’s recent documentary series, there’s an epsiode about water where someone whose pelvic soft tissues had been completely worn away, effectively leaving them crippled. They bathed in a supposedly holy spring on a regular basis, then miraculously regenerated the missing tissue and regained full function. I believe the Vatican investigated it, and they have a very strict criteria for miracles which involves medical documentation of evidence over a period of at least a decade, but they eventually declared that case a true miracle. My take on that stuff is it’s unproductive to obsess over the particulars in a desperate attempt to recreate that specific result. If that kind of thing is meant to happen, it will, but in my opinion it will spring from a positive resonance, not exhaustive nitpicking and dubious isolation of correlation and causation. Also, I’m of the opinion that sometimes we experience supposed adversities to urge us into alternate opportunities we wouldn’t have considered without the adversity, and if we maintain positive resonance, it will become clear that it was actually a benefit over time, even though it seemed like a detriment in the short-term. Basically, I think it’s much healthier and more productive to be present and positive, and not be obsessively or desperately controlling.
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I can only speak for myself and my own perspective on this, though I am aware of other documented stories of healing well beyond what was expected for the condition with the treatments being used in combination with the severity of the illness. I think I am not too worried about reproducing anybody else’s results per se. When I am looking to accomplish something in my life as a matter of consciousness and perspective, I am looking for a solution that is tailor-made for my own particular needs as perceived by me. I think that from my perspective, belief is part of a perspective and consciousness driven reality, but that is just my opinion and opinions will vary. A person who doesn’t believe they can do something won’t even try, and if they do try, it is going to fail because they lack the confidence or belief that it’s going to work. For me personally, I feel like some adversities in my circumstances are not and have not been helpful. I don’t think anyone can tell me how developing POTS in particular, for example, was a benefit when providing therapy and caregiving to a kiddo who at the time still required a heavy amount of physical intervention from a person with a high level of fitness and stamina. Would we have perhaps gotten to the magical place we’re at of working on a school transition sooner if that hadn’t happened? I think so. But you know, however I have approached it, I have approached it with a belief that whatever I did could make a positive impact on the outcomes for me, and it has. I think different strokes for different folks. Can I do mental math and try to come up with some equation where there are things I have learned from the process that have benefited me? Well sure, but I still think it would have been significantly better to have not been something I had to work through in any way. I also think someone can indeed bring a doom of sorts upon themselves by thinking it will happen, and they can bring a liberation from a perceived doom by believing it is a possibility. Not always of course.
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It’s why I try and simply focus on being present and feeling positive, because I’m pretty good at mental math, I’m pretty good at getting people to nod in agreement to my logic. However, life doesn’t seem to nod along as easily, and ends up surprising me and upending my calculations. So I try and let the engine do the work and focus on steering, if that makese sense. Mental math also becomes exhausting after awhile, where if something turns out unexpected I’ll obsess over the calculations, often to find out that I couldn’t have anticipated the progression of events, and I have to accept helplessness as a nested implication. It can become especially frustrating when trying to account for illness or freak accidents, so I just leave that stuff alone. I trust that after I die, things will become clearer, and that I don’t need to get caught up on that stuff while I”m still here.
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Definitely sometimes life surprises us! And you are right, mental math can become exhausting. I certainly think however, I could improve on being present. For me, even if I want to leave the illnesses or freak accidents alone, I still have to find a way to work with them or through them as optimistically as possible because I would rather land on my feet than be upended.
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For me, it’s sometimes just a matter of being willing to forget about stuff for a while. The problem will still be there once I’m done with whatever I’m doing. Strangely, imminent problems are easier to deal with in a way, because they accommodate engagement and help you be present. The other ones are where the imagination can run wild, and the capacity for dreams is wasted on nightmares.
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I can relate to that. For me sometimes even when they are very upsetting, in-the moment problems don’t always allow as much room for the “what if” hamster wheel in my brain to run wild. And that can be a beneficial thing. It is something I need to work on for myself, the desire to have all of the answers I want to have lined up in a row exactly the way I want to have them leading all the way up to the result I want to have. I’ve gotten to the point where if things don’t go the way I wanted I focus on problem-solving to the next best path, and with some things I can do as you have said and put it aside for awhile. Some things though, they keep nocking on brain until I sort through whatever pile of crud I feel needs to be worked through to put it off to the side. And sometimes my hyper-focusing on finding a solution isn’t as productive, and I feel it is important for me to be mindful of that. And you are right, that can turn perfectly good “in the now” moments into something more stressful or upsetting than it needs to be.
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It’s not always easy for me, but it definitely gets easier as I get older. In the past, there have been plenty of times where I’ve attempted to stress over things until a desirable outcome was achieved, but it became clear to me that the stress wasn’t worth it, that even if I achieved the outcome (which happened much more rarely than I thought it would, which factored into the not worth it conclusion), I was too stressed out to enjoy whatever had occurred. Pair that with observations of folks who did better and enjoyed themselves more, and I came to the conclusion that the old school hustle culture of punish yourself until things turn out right wasn’t how existence worked. I love gen z, not just for their quirky speech, but also because of their attitude toward work, life, and openness toward magical thinking. It makes perfect sense to me, as in recent decades it has been shown that our faith in finance, official conduct, and governmental ethics has not been warranted. Societal contracts are not honored enough for people to keep investing blind trust in larger systems. That’s okay by me–I feel like it lets me shift my attention on to what is truly important for me personally.
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I think sometimes that is very much an area I need to improve. Even when I have a legitimate reason for needing to think a great deal about something, not always having every piece decided and in place can mess with my ability to sleep or enjoy the moment. Last night for example, Ok. So we had the official IEP meeting yesterday for our son, and I know that while success in this environment will be possible, it’s going to take a careful approach and will need some fine-tuning related to parts of the environment or routine/schedule that I’m not too familiar with yet. I feel the weight of providing the right amount of support to everyone involved so that this is successful for him, for the staff. And I went to sleep relatively OK, because my brain bought into the thought “I can’t really do anything more for this right now so it will be more productive to sleep.” But then I woke up to use the bathroom around 3:30 am, and my brain just would not let it go. When I have to go into something with a plan, or a plan is more ideal, or even if I’m not wanting to put something aside unless I have some sort of a directional game plan…that is an area I need to do better at and something I admire about your approach. I feel like sometimes the stress of what I do is unavoidable to some degree. I have to be prepared not just to argue for my son’s needs to the steps of the courthouse sometimes, but have the vigilance to prevent unnecessary escalation of those types of concerns, or even have the fortitude to take it beyond the steps when required. I have to juggle what is sometimes a complicated set of variables in terms of therapists, environments, Tony’s own needs and symptoms, family needs, etc and I feel that many of the outcomes have a higher importance level because hit it just right or fail has been too often a theme when it comes to Tony developing a certain skill or a certain area. But I consider many things about what you say, and I am trying to be better about shutting down the unnecessary hyper-focusing on outcome progression/paths when I can.
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Yeah I had a family member report a malignant growth, and I actually forgot about it for two days, until another family member asked about it in a group chat. My reasoning is that the person with the growth seemed to know what to do, at a quick google search it seemed very treatable, so I was best served by going about my life unless I was asked for help. Nightmaring about it not only defeats the purpose of my ability to dream and live in positivity, but also undercuts my practical ability to bring a rested, positive-seeking perspective to the issue if it ever indeed warrants any urgency. That’s how I see it, anyways.
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Yeah, you are right that the stressing, or nightmaring so to speak, about something can affect the ability to rest. Sometimes easier said then done, and I can appreciate that, because I’ve been in both places, where I couldn’t let go of something and I wished I could and I recognized it would benefit me more to do so, and then moments where I could just plunk it down and leave it be between certain hours so I could rest or do whatever else I needed. One of the things I have learned about myself is that getting to upset and focusing on any momentary struggle I am having to lay it aside will just make it worse. I hope things went well or are going well for that family member you spoke of!
Do you have a particular strategy that you find most helpful if something is starting to interfere with your ability to sleep/rest?
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Futility seems to be fairly effective. For something that has a pretty deep hold on me, I’ve come to a point in my life where I’ve noticed there’s a pattern, in that I can feed its strength by wallowing in it or denying/fighting it. The best option for me is to just let it be, understand that it’s uncomfortable but that it will pass as it has in the past. When I was younger, I didn’t have the experience to recognize that as the most effective approach for me, but after trying the other stuff, it’s kind of a default conclusion nowadays for me.
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Now for me personally, I’m a big fan of legit fighting something, but…usually only when it has a chance of improving the outcome. If I know it does not, than I think futility or radical acceptance is a good approach, though I don’t always land on it right away. That of course doesn’t stop me from sometimes having a space of time where I have to rally myself for the fight, because sometimes I get tired of dealing with the crisis parade, and I sometimes just want more people to say “hey, we know things have been pretty hard for your finding sufficient resources to meet his needs and we really do care about the outcomes for your son and we’re not going to try and break the law or try to make things harder for you, just because we don’t want to pay or we don’t want anyone with his level of disability in our space” etc. So sometimes I just want to curl up in a ball each time I encounter a new one of those moments where I feel like people are trying to dig through their procedural knives to find just the right ones they think they might be able to throw to dislodge him from whatever it is they are aiming for. Sometimes I find myself feeling petty enough that I find myself thinking “someday, I hope you’re in my shoes to you can understand exactly how this feels,” but most of the time I can stay connected to my compassion long enough to remember I wouldn’t wish feeling this way on anyone. Better to focus on the positive, but sometimes the fatigue from trying to keep all of this working and afloat just gets to me for a few hours here and there.
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Sounds like you’re gifted in your positivity and compassion, because I’m pretty sure if I was in your shoes I’d immediately feel out of place and my gut would tell me this isn’t my calling. I’ve often found that after getting super angry about something, after constructing all the rationales and justifications as to why I’m being wronged and ultimately why existence isn’t fair or possibly malicious, I would get exhausted and revert back to resignation and acceptance of the situation as is. That’s where I started thinking that if existence was fair and benevolent (in my opinion, the only way it’s worth living), then it would have to be determined by my perspective, not by my thus far insufficient heaps of effort and logic. Anecdotally and personally, positivity seemed to not just produce more desirable outcomes, but also made life worth living, because I realized later that even if I had positive outcomes and I was still swamped by negativity, I wouldn’t want to stick around. Other things that help when I get stuck is looking back and realizing that I was way more negative about stuff than it warranted (over time, negative events would segue or translate into a good long-term outcome), and also, the inevitable truth that all things pass. Soon enough, I’ll be dispersing into a bunch of unremembering particles, or–according to what I believe–I’ll be an unburdened or much-less burdened spirit floating around in a less weighty plane.
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For all of my challenges (and those have been many), I have also been gifted with many things, and I acknowledge it. Compassion alone wouldn’t be enough to do what I have done and what I continue to do with Tony. But yes, this is one of my callings. And the positivity…that just helps me still find joy even when everything else is raining poop on my parade so to speak. It’s just a better, happier place to live most of the time. And you know, I have found that if I give up, I for sure get nothing. If I try even when I am unsure of success, I am more likely to get at least something. So generally, even if I have a moment where I wallow in some upset about a development, I pick myself up as quickly as I can and develop some sort of action plan for what I can do. I feel like for many things, if I had put no effort into them, they would not have happened- especially as regards to Tony. He is where he is because I put a lot, and I do mean a lot, of effort into his outcomes.
Many professionals expect that I have just been handing him off to people and that my involvement was minimal (and anyone thinking that is dead wrong TBH), and up until the last year, I never could…my involvement has been huge, not just for assisting members of his therapy team when he needed two adults to his one, but for the therapy work I did all other hours of the day (which constituted anywhere from 10-30 hours a week, and most weeks, I have been the person putting in the most therapy work him because of hab). The school psychologist and everyone from his new school environment who have seen him on his speech device have been very complimentary about how well he uses it for example. That has a whole lot to do with me, I taught him how to use it when we first got it. Only took me 45 minutes to have him fully independent on how to ask for any food item he liked. But for things he doesn’t want to communicate about, it’s never going to be possible for 1-2 hours a week of speech therapy to produce this kind of outcome. My kiddo has severe ODD, and when you add that to his other conditions… getting him to calmly, safely, and independently do things he doesn’t want to do is a mountain of work and patience. A mountain. And I have provided extensive 24/7 support to his skills there in support of goals therapists wanted and goals important to the family, and so it has been with everything else. Other things however, took a great deal longer. And I know that some people would hope for a much higher level of skills for the amount of effort that has been expended, but, again, he is only capable of what he is capable of in the time-frame he’s capable of doing it, and for him many things are a marathon of many years.
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While it may sound weird, I believe an internal sense of giving up is of great benefit to me. Probably not for everyone, since I am kind of an outlier in my personal drive to pursue my goals. My natural tendency is to obsess and chew over something, and keep a mental death grip on it until it’s fully out of my control because of failure or success. Even then, I would tend to comb over what went right and what went wrong so I could try and apply it to the next pursuit. Typically, I find myself in situations where I know exactly what to do, and obsessing further over it is in the form of negligible details, not even the icing on the cake, but the individual sprinkles, so to speak. So while it may not be for everyone, my focus has shifted to the resonance I bring to each moment, of being more aware of and managing my internal sense of ease, because I know I’ve checked the external boxes ad nauseum.
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Yeah…not gonna lie, sometimes I’m not just a focus on the sprinkles, but let’s look at the sugar and pigment granules in them kinda girl. Sometimes not. Depends on the situation and the needs thereof. Sometimes that level of focus can be productive, and sometimes not- which I readily acknowledge. I say it again, definitely there are some things I admire about your approach and I do find myself reminding myself to try to relax a little more with certain things because reading some of your thoughts has given me cause to reflect on a few things and recognize that it isn’t always a strength to be that intensely focused. Sometimes it is very necessary, but occasionally it just does me more harm than good and I can see that.
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I’m with you on the granules lol, and perhaps it was necessary in my past. Life, however, has shown diminishing returns and–more importantly–fulfillment with that approach for me, so I’ve made the choice to follow the signs. I used to be repulsed and horrified by people that seemingly didn’t, ignored the clues, and refused to leave their castle of denial and dysfunction, altering their physical lives and expression to ensure they never compromised their castle, but that’s greatly lessened. Sometimes I still feel like they’re wasting away needlessly, but as my belief has solidified in the afterlife, and more importantly that everyone is going through their own process for their own reasons, it doesn’t bother me nearly as much or as often. That’s probably a necessary thing for me–I can’t force someone to help themselves, much like when I’ve stubbornly been in the depths of an unconstructive belief, no one could have possibly forced a true shift in perspective on me, For a while, that realization came with a helpless and resigned vibe, but it’s shifted more to the idea that the process of existing is deeper and richer than what is seemingly apparent, and to let it unfold for others–much as it has to unfold for me–without getting bound up in knots.
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Well, I can’t fully give up the examination of granules right now. As much as I’d sometimes maybe like to. And you know, sometimes I really would! At least in areas where I do deem it to be less productive. However, right now sometimes observations of seemingly insignificant pieces make a disproportionately huge difference in what we are trying to do. I was talking with our son’s BCBA today about how things went this morning, and she and I both agree that our son is capable of transitioning into this environment. But, there’s a lot of moving pieces, and there’s definitely some challenges involved with doing so, and I wouldn’t be thinking right now was the time for me to focus entirely on the big picture, because we may need to focus on some teeny, tiny details to help him adjust successfully to this environment in a way that works for everybody involved. But as always, I agree that people can’t be forced to help themselves.
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Things come in cycles, and there are times where I believe it’s time to get down in the weeds. Even then, though, I hold the belief that it’s possible to abide in internal peace, despite an outward scramble or nitpicking. I don’t think it’s a standard that comes with judgment, but a follow-on realization of the fact that obsessing over things needn’t be a way of being, and that the stress that is expected to accompany that needn’t be as great (or even present, optimally) as folks think it should be. Seems like you’re aligning with your calling, even when convention discourages you from doing so. I believe things will continue turning out well for you in the long term, and that even though you may need to work hard, you needn’t be hard on yourself in your own head. You’re following the clues, you’re right on track!
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Convention and I aren’t always comfortable playing in the same bed, lol. In this case, I feel like I am doing what I personally believe is the right thing to do in my circumstances to the best of my ability, and that’s all that can be done. But sometimes I am hard on myself, and I recognize that isn’t always helpful. In this case, I do recognize I have been doing the best I can in somewhat extraordinary circumstances, and while I would like to see certain things happen, some elements are out of my control and that is what it is. Thank you for sending positive vibes into the universe about my/our family’s circumstances ❤
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I’m happy to vibe positive! I’ve recently had some frustrations myself, which triggers my internal search for relief around the subject. In this case, I’ve done everything technically right, so it’s time for the falling out of the airplane mentality, which is just let the bad mood pass, I’m already in freefall, just relax into the descent, because flapping my arms isn’t really going to do anything. Bad moods eventually have to go splat, and sometimes the easiest way into a good mood is accepting that and letting it happen so I can move on to a better perspective.
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I wish you a positive outcome for *your* frustrations, truly I do! Well, that was definitely some effective imagery about the freefall, though I must confess I am not sure I want to splat, just the feeling of stress or worry when it is present. But sometimes those moods are the ones that seem like they are going to cut the parachute chords and leave me as the thing that goes splat. Sometimes life just keeps sending stressful things at such a fast past. The gift of peace is definitely what I want, even when it is raining hard things and I’ve been pushed out the plane before I realize somebody tried to cut the chords. Sometimes all I can do is shake my head. I just found out today I’m going to be needing a hysterectomy because of another polyp. Only wanting positive vibes going into the universe on that one, but if you had to ask me when I would have thought the best timing for that would have been, it *would not* hands down *would not* have been right while we’re working on a school transition for Tony. Sometimes I am not sure what I am supposed to be learning from these moments of layered stressor upon stressor upon stressor. Perhaps it is to relax into the freefall. And maybe just be thankful I’m so close to never having to worry about having a period again, LOL.
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There’s a good deal of peace in going splat myself, I have to admit. The story I’ve crafted about who I am and what I’m going to be will eventually end and give way to another story. I’m fine with afterlife anecdotes, Tyler Henry’s are especially comforting, but abiding in the relief that things I have stressed over don’t warrant the misery and anxiety I had previously attached to them seems pretty awesome. It leads to the visceral reminder that I don’t need to entertain that negativity today, that I can choose to stop telling the story of what I have been and what I supposedly am and just be present, because who knows if I’ll die tomorrow, or if everything was created a second ago with all evidence of a past intact, or if I’m the only being that’s truly alive? If I’m feeling the resonance, I’ll tell the story I want, but if for some reason I’m not resonating with it, then I’ll try and just stop telling any story and be present, if that makes sense.
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Well, I’d rather not go splat just yet. My kiddos need me. So the peace I am wanting and the peace I am asking from the universe is the time I need to help them get as far along on their journeys as possible. But being present in the present regardless of what is going on, you know, I’ve been feeling like I’ve been doing better at that lately and I want to continue doing better at that because I feel like that is a good way to be, to live and focus on the living more than the “what if’s.”
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I absolutely agree. I’ve had decades of being convinced that obsessing over contingencies was the smartest and happiest way to be, and only theoretically acknowledged the power of being in the present. It’s only in the last few years where that’s gone from abstract theory to practical application. A lot of it came from questioning what do I truly believe is the purpose of life? To constantly hem and haw over what I should do according to society and others’ expectations, dashing from this to that in an effort to prevent something that may never happen? To only rest and enjoy myself after scraping myself thin, and take some masochistic pride in how much pleasure and engagement in the present I delayed over the course of my life? It will all be dust soon in a cosmic blink of an eye, which strengthens my conviction in directing my focus onto an enjoyable resonance.
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Sometimes I think the answers aren’t always easy. So, our little man was sick last weekend with a fever, and I asked the school if they needed help on the first day of school since Andy was able to be with Tony and I knew how short staffed many schools are right now. Literally this is a job I could love, I was so happy especially during the second half of the day when I was working with some of the kiddos in a different self-contained classroom than Tony’s. It’s my happy spot, literally everything in my soul was happy and humming with the joy of it. And, it pays super poorly I will tell you that. This is a job I could love to stay at if I didn’t want or need to support myself. I think the people there really care about the kiddos and I have a lot of respect for them, I think they are a great group. But if I did want or need to support myself? Literally, me and my kids would be on welfare and still be in danger of being out on the streets or starving to death if I had to support myself and this was the job I was working.
I feel like now more than ever many people have to chose between the ability to have food/shelter and what they enjoy doing. That can still feel like a life where one is scraping oneself thin. I don’t have all of the answers to this for anyone or even myself right now. All we can do is the best we can do in the present moment. Because starving and being without shelter are both miserable experiences also, much more miserable sometimes than working a job that is hated.
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I’m not trying to be dismissive, but I think the catch-22 rumination of doing fulfilling work for little pay is for folks whose hearts gravitate toward directly influencing that issue. In my opinion, existence gave you an opportunity to be right where you should be, experiencing fulfillment and joy while doing work that you love. I believe that’s yours to immersively enjoy, and when there is an opportunity to shift into more improvement, it will make itself known. Once again, that’s just my opinion. I guess another way of saying is that you deserve the positivity and fulfillment, and that you don’t need to feel guilty, undeserving, or put reservations around it.
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Well, I’m a big fan of immersive joy *and* being able to eat, lol! But you know, I’m a creative soul and it will all work itself out one way or another as regards to the intersection of wants and needs. For right now, I am where I am at doing what is needed to be done, and there are many beautiful moments to be had in the doing of it.
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That’s incredible! I’m truly glad you’ve flowed into a place where you’re getting positive feedback and reinforcement regarding your path! That’s some pretty good life-questing!
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I didn’t realise when I started that most of the 67 comments on this post were from one very interesting conversation! Could I respectfully jump in?
Love the flow of the conversation, Somehow I can picture you very easily as a dog walker, Kent. I hope you enjoyed that job. Dogs are their own blessing, I think. As one human to another human, I’m sorry for whatever made you have to think so deeply about life, but I’m very glad that the cork did float back to the surface as you say. This is absolutely, ridiculously crucial. And whatever it is that makes it float back up, however we explain the physics of it, whatever works, I think is perfectly valid. I think it will be different things for many of us. I don’t know if we’re conceptualising ‘game over’ moments differently but I feel like this could be what happens if the cork doesn’t or can’t float back up? That is something to be lamented, to my mind. I understand the hope behind reincarnation (or respawning, if we’re talking video games?) but like Ariana, I have people depending on me in this life (not to make myself sound important!) and I depend on others (though I would much rather not admit it!), so loss (someone choosing ‘game over’) is not a conceivable option with me, and I will rattle my brain for other pathways forward, for as long as it’s required of me.
When you say you prefer to avoid the company of others that are vibing lower than you I began to worry – there are people close to me vibing lower than myself, and I abhor the idea of just leaving them to it – yes we secure our own lifejackets first I guess (somehow I feel like this is a thing I’ve had to learn and that my instinctual crisis responses might be different), but anyways it runs against my nature to consider people close to me a lost cause, maybe I feel their pain a bit too much to turn away so I am glad that you consider the kindness of showing them an example of how to rise above to a different frequency. I will add this attitude of yours to my toolbox, if that’s ok with you. That’s not to say that I don’t have people around me with whom boundaries aren’t a hugely necessary thing. In fact boundaries have become very recently very important to me, but in such cases I consider that providing an example of ‘rising above’ is still a fruitful strategy!
‘Unsupportable belief’ – if it can be supported, is it not then a truth of some sort? Are not all beliefs to a degree ‘unsupportable’, in that they are beliefs but not yet established truths? Perhaps you mean unproven? Unsupportable sounds a bit short changed. I think there is some beauty in putting stock in instinct/the considerably sentient human gut/intuition/your perspective. These may not be evidence as such, but they are evidence enough, and they support the belief. It’s internally sound. Your idea of resonances is interesting, I have had similar life changing ‘universe-is-conspiring’ moments in my life, though I have given it a very different name.
How saddening to hear that your inner sunflower burst into tears, Ariana. I have never heard this phrase before, it is a lovely idea to think of – I hope your inner sunflower is much happier as time goes on. It is strange how much motherhood (sometimes unexpectedly) draws from us. Whatever it draws, it is encouraging to know that it was there within in the first place, and that it was able to be given.
As you can see, I also ‘struggle’ with wordiness – but ideas get complicated and complicated ideas need more than just a few words! Thanks for your patience with us wordy ones, Kent. And you’d always be welcome to visit my blog Ariana, no matter how wordy you are 😊 *prayer hands emoji*
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❤ I will say, Julia, it was just a matter of luck that I looked up and caught my name in your comment, because while I am subscribed to Kent's posts, I am not subscribed to his comments. It's part of my stress/time management. His writing cracks me up, and I need all the laughs I can get sometimes! I almost never subscribe to blogs just because my schedule, etc. is so complicated, it is hard for me to read everything and I feel that pressure if it lands in my inbox. Because he responds to me, it makes it to my inbox, but perhaps here I think the universe felt I needed to see some solidarity on the wordiness 😉
And thank you for your kind words! Sometimes I am and have been for quite some time dealing with some pretty heavy stuff, I think any sunflower in my circumstances might sometimes droop or cry. That is part of life. I stand in solidarity with your take on wordiness, LOL! I will remember to take you up on your offer to visit sometime your blog, though it may not be in the next several days. I have a super intense schedule the next two days in particular. For today, I am wishing you a wonderful day! 😀
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Yes Kent has a very original sense of humour, his blog is sort of a guilty pleasure of mine… It’s also good for philosophical consideration of a particular shade, I revisit it often. I get the subscribing qualms, I don’t really subscribe for the exact same reason. I like to revisit in my own time. I’m a really committed reader (too committed sometimes!), but of course it takes time to read things and even subscribing to one blog would probably make my head explode with all the new information, and my inbox is already jam packed with things I probably should read but don’t have time too!
I likewise hope you have a good day, and enjoy whatever sunshine you or your sunflower can find. Also hoping you can catch some decent sleep, I’m right there with you on that one too!
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Lol, I get the too committed part! Since I do not have as much time to be as committed a reader as I can be (I used to burn through one to one and a half books a day), It works better for me also to visit things when I have the time. Do you have a favorite genre that you like to read?
I think the biggest factor for sleep for me right now is all of the moving pieces of my son’s transition into school. He has very complex therapeutic and behavioral needs. Last night I struggled more to get my brain to shut down because I was trying to process the more unexpected challenge for the school environment. They have a sensory room with a crash pad. My son loves it. Loves it a little too much! He was trying to create minor diversions to run to it last night, I was trying to do a dry run that would give me a sense of where he was sitting will be when there are other students in the classroom because some were there…and I feel All the responsibility of making sure that this can work for not just Tony, but the other students and the staff at the school. But most nights I can get my brain to shut off well enough to get as much sleep as possible given the time I laid down. Have POTS and perimenopause working against me sometimes, but most of the time I can get between 6 and 7 hours, But that’s usually related only to when I can get to bed with the schedule being what it is. My body still wants eight though lol. Hope you have a great day 🌸
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Yes, the boundaries things is very important! For most of my life, I’ve thought of boundaries framed in a scarcity mindset, where I have to draw the line in order to keep people from taking too much, but after some practice, I realize they enhance relationships by keeping things pleasant and ensuring I can be the best of myself to someone, and giving them the guidance to be the best of themselves to me. And that is how it has worked out at a practical level; certain family and friends who were always associated with animosity and anger in my life turned to cordial and pleasant after I established firm boundaries. As far as unsupportable, I use that term with the nested implication that while most folks don’t understand scientific standards, they do seem to follow the same rough model in that they respect repeatability and the ability to accurately articulate and point out cause and effect. So I understand that some of my beliefs can’t satisfy a roughly established standard of that (arisen from consensus).
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… A book a day keeps the doctor away, is one of my favourite lines! That’s an impressive track record though, one to be aspired to, Ariana 😊 I used to spend a lot of time reading but much less time now, and oh how I miss it! Dystopian has been a longstanding fave genre of mine, this season of my life is leaning heavily on the classics and also some older young adult material. It’s fluid, whatever speaks to me, I guess.
It sounds like you need all the sleep you can get! I too have those nights where my mind thinks it’s appropriate to practice mental gymnastics or something – I dread those nights! I used to get quite mad at myself at not being able to just sleep, I used to think since I can’t sleep I should get up and tick some stuff off my 2022 to-do list (haha – sooo much fun!) but now I just stay in bed and read – I never get past a few pages before it does the trick, especially if it’s low key, slow paced material (I have a pile of books specifically set aside for this purpose – a Put-me-to-sleep Pile if you will, which I mean not in a bad way, at least they’re getting read!)
That’s a very useful way to look at boundaries, Kent. Could you have been a dog trainer in a previous life? You seem very good at laying down the law! Do you think it genuinely leads to betterment in others on some level or are people just different when around you? Sorry if not my business! I feel like most art (including writing) is ‘unsupportable’ by your definition, and rightfully should be – truth, art and science intersect strangely at the best of times, and people with creative minds literally see things differently, whether it’s something tangible like a slab of marble (Michelangelo) or something intangible like potential, reality or the future. I love the open-mindedness and personal resonance that it all brings! I feel like the job of art is to suggest, to evoke, not to tell; it describes things but also says ‘other little things’, these impressions won’t be the same for everyone, though they will be true for each individual. If there was consensus in art (or even just thinking) I feel like it could all become a bit bleh! One of my favourite painters since childhood was William Turner, he had epic powers of suggestion. His paintings are like a symphony on a stormy night, wildly beautiful.
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I’ve had four dogs and worked as a dog walker, so I’m definitely versed in the four-legged ways! As far as boundaries, I don’t think they’re related to betterment in others; my belief is when others want to better themselves, they will find a way with or without me, though my door will always be open to assist them unless they show bad faith or insincerity in their efforts. At that point, the boundaries will be laid, but not vindictively, as they will be welcome to my assistance again if they return with demonstration of good faith and/or sincerity.
As far as art, I believe it is mainly for the artist, as a multilayered channel of their self-expression. Sometimes the art will evoke consensus, but that seems largely dependent on timing the culture, as there have been artists who have been popular and then dismissed after their death, or unpopular and then lauded (like HP Lovecraft or Herman Melville with Moby Dick). To me, it should be first and foremost something that makes the artist feel an existential sense of meaning, because the rest is up for grabs.
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