Came across this fun and profound (profund?) Reddit vid recently :
So I thought I would go through the quotes and comment on the ones that I like.
“Do not believe everything that you think.”
Man do I need to wrap my brain around this one. My conscious, rational self still acts like it’s the only part of me that is real and I still find myself thinking that way sometimes. But I am so much more than this overpowered clattering chatterbox I call my mind. I have a soul as deep and mysterious as an underground lake, a spirit that soars and shines like a golden eagle, and a heart that beats with love for all living things. And I would still have all those things if I was dumb as a post.
“It is easy to fool someone. It is hard to convince them they have been fooled. ”
Solid. And this is exactly how Trump operates. He does whatever it takes to compromise them, then counts on their automatically believing whatever it takes for them to not have to face how deeply they got fucked over. That’s why he still has a death grip on around a third of the American electorate. I
So think twice before hating his people for not waking up to what a pathetic excuse for a charlatan he is, and think about what exactly you are asking of them.
You are asking them to admit to themselves and the world that they have been being fucked up the ass by a cheap con man for 5+ years and been thanking him for it and telling him how proud you are to be his bitch the whole time.
And that. my friends, is a mighy big ask.
“I will try again tomorrow. ”
I need to hear this,. often and loudly. I think I let my frustrations with my lack of life progress color my world view too much, and that leads to my not giving myself credit for how hard I struggle and how difficult it is to be me and how heroic it is that I get up and keep going no matter what. I’m like the Energizer bunny. Fox. Whatever.
I will never stop trying. Trying to grow, trying to heal, trying to find my way out of this labyrinth I generate to hide the world from my eyes.
It will go away when I stop needing it.
And I am working on it.
“The axe forgets. The tree remembers. ”
Covered that one a long time ago, but I like that person’s spin on it. And it reminds me that what is a spur of the moment joke to me might be a life scarring burden that someone will take to their grave to them. Sobering.
“It is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness. That is life. ” – Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise.
This speaks to my sense of strategy. You can make only moves that are optimal based on everything you know and still lose due to factors you don’t know and/or things beyond your ability to control.
Me, I am still trying to get over the need to control outcomes. Or rather,. judging myself with brutal harshness for my inability to do so.
Whatever, man. I’m not in charge here.
More after the break.
More on quotes
Here we go again.
“Living in the future is anxiety. Living in the past is depression. The only solution is to live in the present. ”
Right. Because it’s just that easy,
Then why does the thought of living in the present fill me with anxiety and depression? I don’t know how to live in the present. My deep, deep paranoia demands that I always look to the future in order to spot dangers in time to evade or neutralize them as opposed to have them take me by surprise and force me to deal with them in realtime.
I hate both surprises and dealing with things in realtime.
Living in the moment, therefore, seems like a recipe for overwhelm for yours truly. I have to live in my strangely abstract time delayed safety zone dimension.
Without it, I would be naked before a vastly overstimulating reality.
“Your kid isn’t giving you a hard time. They’re having a hard time. ”
That’s just beautiful. It is so important to remember that however someone, grownups included, is acting, the odds are that they are not doing it deliberately to annoy you.
They are reacting to the situation and their own emotions, just like you.
Remembering this will help you skirt the edges of interpersonal conflict without getting sucked into it and help you remember to be as gentle and understanding as you want others to be with you.
Sometimes being compassionate requires a dispassionate POV.
“You train people how to treat you, unconsciously or not. “
I only figured this out relatively recently. In big and small ways, you reward some reactions and punish others.
And a lot of interpersonal problems can be traced back to rewarding the behaviour you don’t want and punishing the ones you do want.
It’s surprisingly common. Take someone with a history of ending up in abusive relationships. Sure, maybe they just have terrible luck and/or taste.
But it is also possible that they unconsciously training people to abuse them because for them, that is their “normal”, and like an animal seeking its natural habitat, they keep looking for their “normal” no matter how horrible that “normal” is.
I feel like there is something I need to learn from this. Put a pin in it.
Often the real truth only emerges when you ask them hypotheticals like, “imagine you got into a perfectly healthy, loving, totally non abusive relationship. How does that make you feel? Calm and happy? Or anxious and angry? Would you start thinking of your lover as boring, or irritating, or clingy? Do you think you would reward this positive behaviour with love and approval, or punish it with moodiness and irritability? What lessons do you teach with your reactions?>”
That’s a very rough journey to take someone on, and I would never just spring it on someone because I know from experience that some of the worst moments in recovery are the ones where you have to face the ways in which you cause your own pain.
Life is much simpler when you cast yourself as the innocent victim of a cruel world.
But the truth is almost never that simple, and perpetual victimhood denies agency.
If you think of yourself as a victim, then getting better would violate your identity.
And that’s kind of a problem.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.