Me, Myself and I

Today’s blog post is going to be about a goal I should have set AGES ago. I’m also going to address a topic that I drafted up ages ago in a blog post titled something else… As you can imagine from my lack of posting and activity on this blog; I have been super busy as to not have the chance to post. Having said that, the ideas, thoughts and inspirations have all been there and as much as I would like to say I want to try and post more often, I know with the many times before where I have said it, tried and failed I will probably do no good, so instead… I’ll say that I want to post more and hopefully this desire will force me to prioritise my blogging life more and this can be a goal in itself anyway.

So, to the main point of this blog post. My goal for the ‘future’ let’s say, is to concentrate on myself more; I mean this in two ways. The first way, is to be able to spend more time making myself happy, in a non-selfish way. I think I have spent too many minutes of my life thinking about how I can make others happy or wanting to make others happy (not in a people-pleasing way), but in a way that I am fulfilling everyone else’s needs and none of my own. I have grown to learn that I managed to put my own happiness and love for myself to the lowest of my ‘priority list’, I don’t exactly know when or how this happened but I have come to realise that in the past year it has become more prominent than ever before. Due to this, it has become more of a problem that ever before, so much that it is time to address it. Now that I have moved onto a ‘new stage’ in life, I have been able to cut myself off from people who no longer serve in my life in a positive way, and been able to concentrate on a smaller quantity of people and really develop a much tighter, close-knitted and meaningful relationship than I have done before. It has actually been more testing too; as myself and others have become more and more busy, yet being able to maintain a friendship through this has shown me who I should be investing my time on and also those I maybe shouldn’t. As I have less people and distractions to divert my focus and attention, I am constantly trying to intentionally focus more love and attention on myself. It has actually been quite a difficult task, to spend time doing things I like more often, things that make me happy and to focus on myself has surely not been a natural instinct and has proven quite difficult since I started. However, putting this into practice more and more has been just the small stepping stone of a long long journey, something in which I am hoping will eventually become a second nature task; to know what makes me happy, to do those things and in turn be able to bless the friendships/relationships I have with others in a more true and real way… It might now sound like I am being self-indulgent, but honestly I have come to believe that if you are not truly happy within yourself, it will show in the relationships you have with others. Whether you are conscious/subconscious to it, there is bound to be a strain on the relationships and the way in which you can overcome this (unless there is another reason) is to solve these problems starting with yourself first. Love yourself, and everything else will stem from it.

The second way in which I meant by this goal is also concentrating and placing my efforts on working on myself more. By this, I mean that I believe, many of us are far too quick to point out the bad in someone else, rather than ourselves. I, too am guilty of this, most possibly everyday and far more often than I would like to admit. First off, I would like to share a few verses from the bible, which, whether you are a believer or not, you might be able to relate/agree with: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother: ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye’, when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank our of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. Matthew 7:3-5. This verse to me says so clearly and obviously, that we are all often such great hypocrites, we are never able to point the finger at ourselves, instead, we are quick and eager to point out someone else’s faults. In fact, more often than not, if someone were to point out our bad attributes, we instantly jump up to defend ourselves, making excuses and/or denying what is said about us rather than listening, thinking, pondering and deciding whether or not the things in which have been said are true; whether we do need to edify something in our behaviour/actions etc. In which case, of course, there is always something to improve on as we humans are never perfect. Sometimes however, these things need reviewing and reflection because what someone may have pointed out might not be the truth or we may in fact not need to change it at all. Having said that fundamentally, I think that if people are constantly reflecting on their actions and how they are instead of thinking about other people, we would all be able to improve on ourselves as people and therefore, everyone would in turn improve as people and relationships between people would therefore be easier, better and not filled with as many problems. I have decided, that by making improvements and sorting out the plank of wood in my own eye, whether I am able to ‘solve them’ or not, I would hopefully work to be a better person and no longer look to the speck in other peoples eyes and ignoring my own so blatantly obvious plank. I know it might take time and it will take a whole of a lot of effort on my part to remind myself to continually do these things, but I hope by writing this out in a blog post I will hold myself to this ‘goal’ and work on these things for the better.

In these two ways (it adds up to a lot more than ‘two’ really) I hope to thoroughly work on different aspects within my life, starting from myself and slowly working outwardly. I hope to look in a metaphorical mirror more often and this will in turn hopefully allow me to spread these ‘better’ aspects that I work on to other parts of my life and also to the different relationships in which I have with the people surrounding me. So, here’s to new goals and looking to continual self-improvement…

Free

This is quite a personal experience, yet whilst being personal I figure it could possibly help someone out there, and if there’s a possibility of that- what is stopping me sharing this? As well as a book adding to my thoughts on this, the conference that I have attended just a week ago has forced my thoughts on this to become much more wider and broader, this might not make sense right now but I’ll get to explaining now….

As well as it linking to my faith, me being a Christian- I think fundamentally it can reach those who may not share the same faith too. Ever since we are born we are exposed to hundreds and thousands of things- these things of course are all new- say the first word we hear, the first thing we ever smell, the first thing we see- all these things are slowly associated with things that build up our knowledge. So, if we are told “hello” is how you greet someone then this is what our minds will store as a greeting and therefore this is what we will use to greet people. This all sounds really obvious- but thinking about it more deeply, if someone were to tell you something that was wrong, then this information would stay with you, and you would not know to change this until you were told it were wrong. For instance let’s say that you were told that to eat with a fork you hold it at the end with the prongs, you then start eating with a fork this way and unless you were told otherwise or you slowly noticed you were wrong by watching other people you would have no clue that you were wrong- and even more so, if it were someone in whom you trusted that told you this false information then you may think that the person trying to correct you was the wrong one. That they were the one who needed to be corrected.

So linking this to something that actually might make more sense in terms of the title of this blog post, if we were told lies about ourselves since we were born and whilst growing up, how would this make us view ourselves?  It is an inevitable situation that occurs in each and everyones lives. Even though the degree that this may affect each individual might be different, it is still bound to happen regardless. Whether this be in terms of friends, family, social media, strangers, enemies etc etc.. Like I mentioned before, if this were told to us more importantly by someone that we were really close to and we trusted them, this would stick with us even more- and again, someone telling us anything different and trying to correct would not matter as we wouldn’t believe them anyway. These inaccurate self-portraits that we make of ourselves are filled with things that are not always the truth, we may think that just because all these people have said this or that we must be these things they say, yet what we don’t know is just how inaccurate they are- just how little they may know about us or maybe even that they said some things out of jealousy, anger, hatred or pure maliciousness. These things can overtake our lives and lead us to believe such false things about ourselves, when really we are quite the opposite of these lies. And sometimes, the even more difficult thing is when people tell us you are not “useless” you are in fact “really very helpful” we do not believe them for a second. Even if they tell us with their most sincere voice, with full eye contact and pleading for you to believe them, we cannot and will not. When a full new skin is formed that we walk in, when new bones are etched with fake lies, when our body is not one that is of us- we can imagine just how hard this is to get rid of. How to break free of these lies and built up comments and adjectives describing someone who is not ourselves at all.

Now that you are three paragraphs into this blog post and reading the fourth, I want to apologise, because if you relate to any of this at all- this might not be what it seems, in that I probably won’t be able to help you. If anything, I know that a blog post like this would have never helped me. But just in case, I’m going to finish by saying- You are not what you believe you are. There are possibly many times you have failed to see this, and many times you have tried to think the opposite of all these lies are true. I want to say to you that they are true, the opposite of these lies really is the truth!! That you are able, you are beautiful, you are more than enough, you are great, you are amazing, you are incredible, you are courageous, you are powerful, you are awesome and right now I believe that these words are not sinking in. So please, go back to that start of that sentence and read it out loud, read it in you head if you can’t read it out loud yet, but read it and try your hardest to believe it and try to read it again and again- because I do and I know that these things are true and I also know that if I can begin believing these things- so can you. I know that this is such a hard thing to even think about doing yet alone attempt to do, but in breaking all these “agreements” you’ve made with yourself that you are this, or that- You will find a freedom like no other. Honestly, it is the best feeling and I hope that you can also feel this soon too. I wish you all the best. You are an overcomer.

Creating stars

I’m in no way shape of form where I would like to be, where I think I should be and where I see myself in my head. Almost everyday I will question my position at that given time. Sometimes the answer that I conjure up in my brain is long-winded and unnecessary, other times I disregard it and continue on as anyone would. In these times I am reminded that I as a mere human being living alongside the other billions of people on this planet have one life, one life to live. And one life to make the most of… It’s all good and well for one to say that their goal is to “be happy” or their goals are to “fulfil this or that dream”. But really, who knows the steps to those “dreams”, who knows what it takes to fully, truly be happy. Whilst one child sits in a mud bath making mud pies and refuses to go on that sunny beach holiday; knows nothing past that happiness at that given time. The child in fact refuses such luxury. So I ask, who knows? As much as I would like to say I have it all figured, I really don’t want to either. Learning to embrace what is to me the [beauty in life], in not knowing exactly how this whole puzzle fits together is something that has and will always be a difficult thing. There are moments where I have been pushed to anger, frustration and desperation but something tells me that there’s a reason why we haven’t figured it all, that not everything makes sense. And that at the end of the day. It’s okay. Although I do not have the words or vocabulary to express my complete and whole thoughts on it, I know that the path that lies ahead is easily said to be a mystery to each individual at least, I can’t say it will be easy, and I can’t say it will be hard. I’ve known that there is rain after sun, there is hardship after joy and there is failure after success. I’ve also known though, that there is such hope as rainbows, such thing as perseverance and such strength in overcoming setbacks in life. It pains me to say that there will never be another promised good day as much as it relieves me. There is beauty in all the imperfections if one would just look for them. There is beauty in all those flaws that we all perceive to be ugly and faults in life. There are those times where we stop and think about such imperfections and see nothing but an ugly picture, yet how else would the picture be whole without them. I wonder if ever, could I count all the stars in the sky, at a given time? Well the answer is obvious, it is impossible. How amazing that would be, yet how silly that would be to think. I believe this is the same in our lives. How we try to see and count every day we have yet to live. How silly that would be. I tell myself that this is how it’s meant to be and how we all live. Yet I’m sure if we could all have that impossible chance to see and count all them stars we would. Striving to something that is unknown to us sounds silly also, we dream of those “happy days”, however would we know one even if we were living one?

I say, take the life and ignore the stars. Why look at the already made stars, when you can create your own? Take the day and make it bright. Make it shine with a brightness that overwhelms and satisfies. Yes it’s difficult, of course it is. And surely one day will inevitably be harder to make bright than another, yet surely striving to this is much more achievable than anything else we strive towards. So why not begin trying that now? Even if you fail, you’ll have created and pieced your own puzzle together, with your own splashes of imperfect and beautiful colours.