life

Fear

~ tonirib ~ Leave a comment
 “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
– Frank Herbert, Dune

Life is governed by fear. If you think your life isn’t governed by fear then you are out of touch with your reasons for doing things. Fear and love (which is partly just a fear of losing someone’s love) are the only true motivating forces in a person’s life.

Fear of failure. Fear of success. Fear of hurting someone. Fear of not being able to pay your bills. Fear of making a mistake you can’t take back, can’t fix, can’t remedy. Fear of losing your job. Fear of spending too much time in a job you hate. Fear of disappointing those around you. Fear of disappointing yourself.

Fear, in one form or another, is at the base of every decision you make. If you accept this, if you realize the truth if this statement, then you can start figuring out what fears to pay attention to and what fears to drop in the dust like the dirty rags that they actually are.

Some fears are good. You should be afraid of seriously injuring yourself. You should be afraid of going to jail.

You should not be afraid of making a mistake that won’t result in death or jail. If the consequence of your mistake is possibly being happier, even if you have less money or people judge you for it…then what are you really afraid of?

How much do you let fear of something you shouldn’t be afraid of hold you back? How much do you hesitate when making a decision because you’re putting more stock in fear of failure than in what you actually want? How often do you bite your tongue, tell a lie, or nod your head in false agreement because you’re afraid of what might happen if you speak your mind?

We are taught to be afraid. Society teaches us to be afraid of basically everything. Do you have a fear of not being attractive even though it isn’t really important? Do you have a fear of not having a job that other people consider professional or successful? Do you have a fear of being called a bitch just because you’re a woman with opinions? Congratulations, you were raised in America.

But just because you’re taught to have these fears doesn’t mean you’re forced to live with them forever. I’ll let you in on a little secret: most of these fears are total bullshit.

You can keep making excuses for letting fear rule your life or you can start to use logic, reason, and a sound understanding of what you really want to get over that fear. Next time you hesitate, next time you are trying to make a decision, ask yourself if it’s a valid fear that’s governing your actions. Can you trace the origin of that fear? Is it something that’s happened to you in the past, is it a legitimate concern, or is it maybe something that’s been drilled into your head by your family, friends, and every commercial you see on television? Are the consequences of taking a leap in a new direction really that dire?

Fear is what you let it become.

Be a Chef

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“Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.” – Richard Feynman

I’m going to start out this post by linking to the Wait But Why final blog on Elon Musk. It’s super long and it will take you more than an hour to read, but you should read it.

Now I’ll pretend like you read it since I’m sure most of you didn’t when you realized I was totally serious about it being very long, but I’m going to structure this post based off of it.

The main concept in there is that in the world there are chefs (people who follow their own path, question everything, constantly reevaluate themselves, aren’t afraid to speak up or change, etc.) and cooks (people who, to some extent, follow what they have been told is true). I read the entire article and I would like to think that I am a chef, and I think that if you’ve been reading this blog you might actually agree.

Here’s why:

I write in Speak Up about being unafraid to say what’s on your mind and to state what you’re actually thinking even when you may have some (unfounded) fear of something bad happening because of it.

I write in The Lost Art of Wanting about evaluating what you really want, versus what you just think you want (and maybe why you think you want it).

I write in You Are Not an Event about it being okay to fail, because even if you fail it doesn’t make you a failure, so you shouldn’t be so afraid to fail in the first place.

I write in Comparisons (and the Death of Your Happiness) about using comparisons to as a tool to figure out what you want and how to get it, instead of just thinking about what you don’t have.

I write in The Nature of Change about not being able to know everything about yourself from the beginning and the importance of constantly re-evaluating who you are what what you want and why you want something.

I could go on, but I’ll stop there.

I realized that the entire point of this blog (which has always been a little unclear to me since the beginning) is to convince other people that they can be chefs. That there is nothing special about me that allows me to quit my job, to speak up, to embrace change, to say ‘fuck it’ to the things I’ve been told will make me happy. There’s no reason why you can’t look at the world the way I do, why you can’t act upon what you really want to do, and why you can’t embrace change right now to be more of who you want to be.

Be a chef. If I haven’t convinced you yet, and Tim from Wait But Why hasn’t convinced you yet, then I guess you’ll just have to keep reading this blog in the hopes that one day I’ll convince you.

Your life is too short to spend it in autopilot.

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)

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“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.

The Nature of Change

~ tonirib ~ 1 Comment

“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.” – Richard Feynman

You can’t know everything about yourself from the beginning.

Sometimes we treat decisions as finite things. Once you’ve thought about something for a while, weighed your options, and decided, you have to follow through with that decision. Otherwise, you’re just someone who doesn’t know what they want.

I find that it’s not that I don’t know what I want, but that what I want changes quite often. I get bored easily. I can’t sleep, and so I think. Or possibly I can’t stop thinking and so I can’t sleep, but that’s a topic for another day.

When I first moved to Los Angeles back in 2007, I told all of my friends and family in Minnesota that I would never leave. I loved Southern California, I loved Los Angeles, and I had found my permanent home. And it was true. I absolutely believed that at the time. But you can’t know everything about yourself from the beginning. After 5 years, I was ready to start looking elsewhere and I got a lot of questions from friends, but especially my family.

“But I thought you said you never wanted to leave?”

“What about everything you said to me a year ago?”

It’s almost like people don’t want you to change your mind once you’ve decided. Like somehow, wanting to try on a new place, a new face, a new personality is a bad thing. People get used to one version of you, and whether or not they love that version of you, it’s familiar. 

Have you ever broken up with someone only to have them say, “But you said you loved me?” I have. I find it hard to explain to them that I did love them and that I absolutely meant it when I said it and wasn’t lying. Because that’s what people assume when you change your mind, isn’t it?

You were either lying to yourself or lying to them. Or maybe both. Maybe you’re doing one of those things now.

When did change get so associated with dishonesty? As far as I’m concerned, life is change. If I’m not changing, I’m stagnating. It’s not simply that I’m staying the same or not progressing, I actually feel like I’m suffocating. I obsess over the questions, “What have I done in the last year? How have I improved myself? How can I do better next year?” Because there are always ways to make yourself better. There are always new things to try, new places to see, new friends to talk to, new skills to learn, new….anything.

I don’t expect everyone to get it. Most people I meet are fairly happy doing basically the same thing, day in and day out. They accept life for what it is currently and can exist that way for years, even if they’re unhappy. I see it all day, every day at my current job.

To me, it’s utterly terrifying.

Real change is difficult. It’s unfamiliar and it takes a lot of effort. I’m often scared when I start something new that I won’t be good at it. Or that I’ll ruin the small life I’ve built for myself. Or that I’ll disappoint or hurt someone, because what I currently want is exactly the opposite of what I said I wanted (and what I really did want) at some earlier point in time.

Why throw away my decent paying job and benefits for something totally unknown when I could just…not? Besides, I have a husband to think of. My parents paid for that college education of mine for this specific industry I now want to leave. I made promises, and I should keep them, whether or not I believe in them now. Things will get better eventually, right? This is what I wanted 6 years ago, so if I just wait it out, I’m sure I’ll eventually get used to it and just be happy. 

Or I’ll just go numb.

So I choose not to sit around and think about how I could be happier. I choose to allow myself to change as much as I want to, as often as I want to. I’m not looking for the internet’s answer to happiness, I’m looking for my answer to happiness.

I can change. I can be different. I can want something new today.

I can change. 

I can be different.

I can want something new today.