Month: September 2015

The Ender Complex

~ tonirib ~ Leave a comment

“Ender Wiggin must believe that no matter what happens, no adult will ever, ever step in to help him in any way. He must believe, to the core of his soul, that he can only do what he and the other children work out for themselves. If he does not believe that, then he will never reach the peak of his abilities.”
– Colonel Graff, Ender’s Game

This will probably be a difficult post for my parents to read, since I know they read this. But I’m going to write it anyway, because it has a happy ending, and because writing is how I process things.

Today I was reading this article on student resiliency in college and how a society of helicopter parenting has hindered the ability of young adults to figure out their own problems. I agree with it. Entirely.

I may not have agreed when I was in high school or early college. My parents sort of checked out of their parenting around the time I was thirteen. I’ve read Ender’s Game obsessively since then because it’s not only the best book ever but also because I felt like I connected with Ender. There was more than one instance where I came home crying because something had gone terribly wrong with my friends, my boyfriend, school, whatever. I wanted my parents to fix it. I wanted someone to tell me it was okay. I wanted to be coddled and have someone else make the problem go away.

But the response, in my case, was generally that it was my fault. I was to blame. There was no support system. There was no reassurance that I was a great person who didn’t deserve something like that. There was usually only reinforcement of the shame that I already felt. If I was going to get out of the mess, I was going to have to do it myself.

I was Ender. No adult was going to help me. If my own issues were going to be solved, they weren’t going to be solved by a parent, or a teacher, or a counselor. They were going to have to be solved by me.

And I’m so much better for it now.

Sure, if you go back two posts you’ll realize that it also screwed me up for a while. But I was forced to take my own life – issues and happiness, failures and accomplishments – into my own hands.

My life is mine and I don’t need someone to force feed me life lessons to understand what I want or what I should be doing. I don’t need someone watching over me to cushion a fall. I don’t need to succeed every time. I don’t need to grasp the meaning of something the first time around.

If you don’t fail on your own, with no one around to help pick you up, how will you ever learn that you can pick yourself up? It’s not an easy lesson, but it’s one that every person needs to learn. Has to learn.

You will be criticized. You will fail. You will try your best at something and have it come out looking like a 6 year old did it. You will make mistakes. You will choose incorrectly. You will hurt someone, and you will hurt yourself.

But if you always let someone else solve those problems, if you always put the blame on someone other than yourself, if you always reach for an external solution instead of an internal one, you’ll never get past it.

So yes, I’m happy I was alone. I was so mad at my parents for so long for not seeing me for me that I didn’t realize that part of what they had done was made me into me. Sure, it wasn’t intentional on their part, but regardless of how I turned into the strong, independent, creative, and unique woman I am today, I owe a lot of it to them.

Don’t hold someone so close that you don’t let them find trouble. And once they find it, you need to let them find their own way out of it sometimes. Every time they struggle for something and win it reinforces that they’ll be able to do it next time. And within every struggle, they’ll uncover a little piece of themselves, which is something that they’ll never forget.

Sacrifices

~ tonirib ~ Leave a comment

“Wish we could turn back time, to the good ol’ days,
When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out.”
– Twenty One Pilots, Stressed Out

In preparation for starting at Turing in October, they are having the students take some online Ruby prep courses through a program called Tealeaf Academy. I started this a few weeks ago, right around the time I quit my job. One of the first things they had us do was watch a video introduction to the course. At one point the instructor asks [paraphrased],

“What are you going to sacrifice to take these courses? Time with your family? Time for your hobbies? Something else? Because if you’re going to devote the time you need to learn this new skill and change your life, you have to sacrifice something.”

That small moment, only about a minute in a sixty minute video, has stuck with me since then. He was right. In order to do all of this prep work, in order to participate fully at Turing, I’ve had to start sacrificing things.

I may have quit my job (the first sacrifice! though it wasn’t really a loss to me) but I’m actually busier than I was when I was still working. I’m now doing 8 – 10 hours of coding 6 days a week trying to finish my online nanodegree at Udacity and complete the prerequisite work for Turing. I’ve had to sacrifice my free time and time with my husband. I’ve had to sacrifice some of my exercising, because I simply can’t fit it into my day anymore. I’ve had to turn down going out to do things because we’re on a tight budget.

You aren’t going to get real change without sacrificing something. And in order to sacrifice, you have to determine what your priorities are. Anyone who has ever tried to lose a significant amount of weight can confirm this.

I am pretty good at prioritizing. I can look at all the things I have to (or want to) do today, this week, this month, this year and separate out what’s really important to me and what can be pushed aside. Sometimes it’s not so easy but that’s what journaling, talking, and making pros/cons lists are for. The important part is that you realize you must sacrifice something if you’re going to try to add something that either directly contradicts how you’ve been doing things or that requires a significant amount of time.

There are a lot of people who are terrible at prioritizing. I think of them as can’t-say-no people and they refuse to believe anything must be sacrificed. Now, sometimes this works. Sometimes. Most of the time you see people who become really, really stressed out because they are trying to fit so much into one day that it’s difficult to keep up with.

That’s where honesty with yourself comes into play. You have to know yourself well enough to be able to look at all that you want and to truthfully answer the question, “Can I really do all of this?”

I think that the majority of my friends are pretty honest with themselves, but I know quite a few that aren’t. If there’s one single thing I could wish upon everyone, it’s to be honest with themselves. Does anyone realize how much conflict is caused because people aren’t really honest with themselves? Because they can’t see who they really are, or more accurately, refuse to admit who they really are?

How can you move forward if you don’t know your own strengths and limitations?

Next time you’re thinking about making a change (and I don’t mean buying new sheets), make sure you look at everything else you’re already doing to figure out if anything needs to be cut. Figure out what you really want (not what anyone tells you to want), what you can honestly manage in any given day, and what needs to be sacrificed for the greater good of yourself.

More Than You Wanted To Know

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“There’s something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt at least a faint, morbid urge to jump. And anyone who has ever put a loaded pistol up to his head… All right, my point is this: even the most well-adjusted person is holding onto his or her sanity by a greased rope. I really believe that. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human animal.”
– The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet, Stephen King

When I was a kid, I thought I wasn’t special. Regardless of how I feel about myself now, that’s how I felt at the time.

I watched movies and read books and thought there was more to life than I was seeing. More to life than I was participating in. And I started to get the wrong ideas.

I watched A Beautiful Mind, I read The Virgin Suicides,  I watched Girl Interrupted, I wrote poetry, I looked deep into myself and thought, “There’s more than this normal life that I’m living.”

I desired to be crazy.

I wanted to have something clinically wrong with me. I wanted to be different. I didn’t want to fit in, I didn’t want people to understand me, I didn’t want me to so damn normal. I wanted to be someone people who remember meeting. I wanted to be…off. I met people who had been institutionalized and I wanted to be there. I wanted their story.

Don’t ask me why; I can’t explain it. I don’t know why I wanted it, I just know that I did.

So I made myself that way. I tried to be different. I tried to act different, I tried to dress differently, I tried to see things differently. I wanted so badly to hallucinate seeing and hearing things…that I started seeing and hearing things. For real. It scared the shit out of me. There’s nothing more terrifying than turning to your best friend sitting next to you in a field at night and saying, “Who’s coming to meet us here?” pointing to the girl walking towards you only to have her look at you confused and say, “What are you talking about?”

I thought crazy was cool. I thought depression was cool. So I tried them on like normal teenagers try on clothes. But what I discovered is that it’s not like trying on clothes. You can’t take them off quite so easily. You can’t say, “look at how cute this is!” and then move onto the next thing without blinking an eye.

You get stuck.

And I was stuck for a really long time.

There’s a quote from Girl Interrupted (the book) the goes,“Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates.”

And I was. Flirting with it that way. But then suddenly I was sucked in and I was living it and I couldn’t get out. For a few years I didn’t actually want to get out. You can translate ‘a few’ to be about 7 years. I didn’t want to get out because even though I was miserable at some point it was just who I was, and at least I was interesting. At least I wasn’t just some other girl that you met and didn’t remember.

At some point I became aware that I was done with it. So done. I was destructive to myself and those around me. I wasn’t interesting; I was unreliable. I wasn’t intoxicating; I was just intoxicated. I had long grown tired of who I had become and I had grown tired of wanting to change but not actually changing.

So I changed. I made a huge effort to do the opposite of what I would normally let myself do in most situations. I tried to reverse everything I had done to myself so many years before. And I succeeded.

Mostly.

Depression, mental illness, insanity, eating disorders, self doubt…they’re all things that never entirely go away. They’re lurking behind every door, every conversation, every mirror, every look, every drink you have. You can be who you want to be twenty four hours a day every day for weeks before you let your guard down for a minute and your old habits sneak up on you. They’re never entirely gone and you’re never entirely the same.

So some nights, like tonight, it’s just one little thing. One thing that, for reasons even unknown to you, sets you off. And here you are, in bed, back to where you were six years ago, feeling like the only thing you can do is write. You know you’ll wake up feeling differently tomorrow, and that everything will be back to normal tomorrow, but you’re sitting here now thinking,

“What’s really me?”

Comparisons (and the Death of Your Happiness)

~ tonirib ~ Leave a comment

“We never cease wanting what we want, whether it’s good for us or not.”
– Stephen King from Full Dark, No Stars

You wake up in the morning. You’re feeling pretty good about what you’re going to do today because the day is bright and shiny and full of possibilities (unless you’re hungover in which case you put your head under the pillow and wish you hadn’t woken up at all). You roll over, grab your phone, and immediately bring up Facebook.

And oh, you wish you hadn’t done that.

Your Facebook wall is full of photos of things you’re not doing. Traveling, saving money, losing weight, working at a job you absolutely love, getting 2nd place in a bike race, going to Burning Man, taking your amazing dog for an amazing hike and hanging out with all of your amazingly happy awesome super smiley friends.

Fuck. What were you doing today? Suddenly, it doesn’t seem to matter all that much.

Now you’re starting your day thinking about all of the cool awesome life experiences you could be having that you’re not having. Just to make it worse, you decide to go on instagram or twitter, because at this point, who cares? You already feel bad about your own life and your own choices.

If you’re like me, this happens every morning. The routine ‘let-me-compare-myself-to-everyone-else-even-though-I-know-it-isn’t-real-but-now-I-feel-bad-anyway’ morning confidence slayer that for some reason seems to define how us twenty-somethings feel about life. Even if you’re pretty happy with how your life is going right now, there is still always someone doing something better.

I have two thoughts I’d like to get across on this topic. They aren’t new thoughts, because I’ve read blogs about this exact topic before, but they are my thoughts so if you’re reading this, you’re going to listen to them anyway, despite their lack of uniqueness.

One: These Facebook lives are filtered. They are exactly what your friends want you to see and nothing more. The screaming match they got into with their friend the other day? Definitely not part of a post. Smiling at work when they really want to be slapping someone for their stupidity? You can’t put a ‘Lark’ filter on that one to make it look nicer.

So why do I sit around caring about what other people are posting? Probably because even though I know it’s only the good parts of their lives, I still want those good parts! I want to take all of their amazing moments and shove them into my 24 hour day so I can feel as happy as they look in that photo.

Realistically, I can’t do all those things and 1) still have money and 2) get any sleep, ever. Also, if I realllly wanted to do all those things, I would actively make plans to do them. Which is why I’ve done more hiking this summer, because I got sick of all the stupidly beautiful hiking photos from other people. I wanted those hiking photos, so I set out to get some.

This leads me into thought number two, which is: If you are sitting around looking at your Facebook feed now, you might as well be productive about it. If there is something out there you are just dying to do, you should start working towards doing it. It’s not useful to yourself (or anyone around who is going to listen to you complain) to sit around and simply look at these things without actually doing anything about it.

Today, my feed seems to be filled with amazing photos and videos of Burning Man. It’s gotten me thinking that yes, I really, really do want to go someday. So instead of just waiting until this time rolls around every year and complaining about how I didn’t go and about how I don’t have enough money to go, I should pick a year I want to go and start planning and saving now. Then eventually I can be one of those people who is annoying you on your Facebook feed with all my awesome photos of BM.

I don’t think we’ll ever be able to stop comparing ourselves to others. I’m not writing this entry to say, “we all know it’s semi-fake so just stop comparing yourself, mmkay?” That’s unrealistic. It’s like telling my generation that we should all delete our Facebook accounts tomorrow and thinking that’s somehow going to happen.

I’m writing this because instead of uselessly comparing yourself to your friends and sabotaging your own happiness, take a look at that feed of yours and ask yourself what you really want to be doing. It’s probably something that takes some planning to achieve, but likely it’s something you can do if you put forth the effort. You can’t help but compare, and you can’t change what other people post, but you can change what you choose to do in your own life because of it.

Your Moment

~ tonirib ~ 1 Comment

“Careful now, you’re so beautiful
When you’ve convinced yourself
That no one else is quite as beautiful.”
– Dashboard Confessional, So Beautiful

I hesitate to say all, but I will say most of having a defining moment in our lives. At least one. Probably two, or three, or more than a dozen over time. A moment when your world threatens to fall apart. When you have the choice [and you do, have a choice that is] to either slide down the slope of embarrassment, resentment, shame, regret, and self-loathing….or to pick yourself up and say, “How can I turn this into something positive? How can I make myself better because of this?”

I will let you in on two in my life.

The first one is perhaps an extended moment. I had cancer when I was 18 months old and I lost my left eye to it. I don’t remember ever having two eyes. I don’t know what my parents went through when they found out their daughter had surgery and only had a 40% chance to live.

All I know is I was a kid with one eye, and I was [and am] different. I can’t put eyeshadow and eyeliner on properly because my eyelids don’t sit symmetrically. I’ll never be a model and I can’t take the perfect selfie unless one eye is hidden by hair.

But I made a choice, so many times growing up, to not be ashamed of this. Sure, there are days that I wake up and wish that I had two eyes. That I looked like everyone else. That I could look to the side in a photo and not look like a weird caricature of someone. But it doesn’t define me, at least not in a bad way. I make one-eye jokes all the time because it helps let people know that it’s okay. It’s okay to talk about it. It’s okay to ask, because I’m okay with it.

Having one eye is something I can’t change, so I might as well get over it and just be me.

In high school, a friend and I decided to run for Student Government Secretary. We knew we would lose, because we were running against the popular guy. So we decided to make the most ridiculous speeches possible since they were broadcast to the entirety of our 2500 person high school. He made an entire speech about the song ‘My Humps’ with hand drawn pictures included. It was amazing.

I took my eye out on camera.

The reactions were varied. Some people championed it. Some people thought it was hilarious (which was the intent). But I also got anonymous messages telling me I should kill myself. I got people telling me I was gross and disgusting and that I should be ashamed. I could have let these things get to me, but I didn’t. In fact, I repeated the whole thing in college, earning myself the nickname ‘Leela’ with the USC Drumline.

Sure, some people think it’s gross and weird, but I don’t. I simply won’t let how other people view my physical appearance define who I think I am.

My second moment is a more of a ‘moment’ and in fact an ‘ah ha!’ moment to put it frankly. Without going into too many details, before classes even started my senior year of college, I got called into the office of our band director and told that I couldn’t be Drumline Section Leader anymore. In fact, I couldn’t be any type of leadership. I couldn’t even go on my senior trip to Hawaii.

And it was all my fault. Someone else may have been the reason the leadership found out about what I had done, but it was my fault.

As someone who spent many years of high school and college depressed and blaming herself for everything that went wrong, I went back to my house and locked myself in my room. As the others involved raged about it and threatened to quit band (and some did), I spent a lot of time lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling.

I surprised myself that night. Usually, I would have broken up. And by ‘broken up’ I mean totally and completely lost it. I would have cried, and sworn, and told myself I was such a miserable idiot for putting myself in that situation. I would have tried to drink it away and become even more of a mess.

But it clicked for me that night. I could do all that, and sure, it would be easy. It would be so easy to just give in. But it would be more useful – more useful by far – to do the difficult thing of saying,

“Yes, I screwed up. Badly. Really badly. But I won’t let this moment define me. I won’t give in. I won’t give up. I will move forward, and I will move forward now. I will find some way to make this experience a positive thing. I don’t know how I’m going to manage to do that, but I’m going to do it.”

And I did.

I still think back to that day wondering where on earth that mindset came from. I wonder what woke up inside of me. I wonder what finally realized that I can define myself. I can choose to define myself, even when I’ve made a major mistake.

And you can too.