Friday, April 13, 2012

To sacrifice one's selfishness.

I think this article is gorgeous. The writer's ability to understand what the god Kali stands for is something special to which I relate.
I understand people. And I love them. I love all parts of them. The good and the bad. I especially love the bad--or at least what people believe to be bad about themselves. We're all beautiful. And we all deserve to be loved.
Once I began to embrace the negatives in others, I began to embrace my own negatives. And I realized they weren't so negative after all. And now I reeeeeeally love people. I simply adore them now! I no longer hate people--I thought I honestly hated people until recently. I see all the things people hate about themselves, and I want to express my love for those things. Loud and proud! I want people to see that it isn't weird to love yourself or your body.
The body is a temporary thing, and to fixate on it can lead to unhappiness and self-disgust. I've been down that road. I hated myself and my body for too damn long.
It can be normal to love yourself. I promise it can be normal. If you stop hating people simply because you fear their judgement, you can open your mind to the possibility that people might actually love you. And if the people you expect to love you decide that they don't/can't, trust that there will be others around the corner waiting to embrace you. Open your mind to the possibilities. "Sacrifice your selfishness." Sacrifice the comfort of hiding from your fears, and experience the beauty that comes from facing them head-on.


I will do my best in this life. I will dance and make music, and I will love all people.

And now I will go read some Nietzsche. :) Peace & love.




Wednesday, April 11, 2012

What do I love?

All the things I love most are things that don't need to be sold to have value.
I love nature, and trees, and the birds and the bees. I love water, and food that is healthy for me. I love humans for sharing my thoughts when I need. I love music for listening when humans can't see.
These things have no pricetag or easily defined value; and as we become increasingly cutoff and separated from them in the structured world we are building, it becomes easier to lose concern and respect for them. So we let them go. We don't do this because we are mean. I think we do it because we sincerely just don't know. We are simply unaware, and that is okay. Being unaware gives us the ability to learn and become aware. We can either help people find awareness, or we can berate and belittle them. So easily we are able lower their self esteem, and then we are better able to coerce them into sharing our ideals. We can use scare tactics.

Or, we can love them. And we can encourage them to recognize the implications of their actions, good or bad. And we can allow them to love us. And we can allow them to recognize the implications of our own actions, good or bad. And we can ourselves recognize the implications of our own actions, good and bad. But ultimately, I believe a person has to make their own decisions, and all people are entirely capable of making their own decisions.

You are great.
And the greatest things in the world are things that don't need to be sold to have value.

Be true to yourself. If you can love yourself when others don't, that is real power. That power is in your hands alone. You hold the key to your happiness.

I have realized these things for myself recently. I am trying to love myself enough to withstand the haters. "Let the haters hate. Let the lovers love. Let the ballers ball."

Saturday, April 7, 2012

Masters, slaves, and those beyond categorization.

I have been thinking hard on the following questions:
When one chooses to engage in human relationships, is he necessarily 'sacrificing' his individuality? Is it boastful and conceited to even consider the loss of one's individuality within a group as a sacrifice? Is it noble to sacrifice one's individuality for the good of the group? From where does the desire and/or need to boast originate within a person? I have at least an idea from where that need originates within myself.

I want to love myself. I am jealous of people who love themselves. So I make them feel bad. This way I can feel better about myself.

Then I push them far enough away to end the friendship entirely, and I still try to make them feel badly. I latch on to the concept of happiness so tightly in my mind that it becomes impossible to recognize and experience the actual happiness that already makes itself available to me.

I victimize for my own personal gain the individual who loves his/her Self. I become an oppressor, they the oppressed. I the master, they the slave. I feed on this relationship and the power I imagine it gives me. I need to be better than everyone. I cheat them into believing they love me, so I am able to love myself. It's a cheap way to find love.

I don't know why I don't love myself. But I'm ready to quit being lazy, and find reasons to love myself. I'm ready to quit hurting the people around me who want nothing more than to be happy and to see me be happy too. I'm tired of asking them to slow down for me. And I'm ready to start speeding up. And I can only hope they are ready to forgive me. Because there will be people who can't forgive me.


I am so grateful for those beyond categorization. The individual person free of labels, neither a master nor a slave, is capable of revealing to a master his own weakness.
The individual is a curiosity to the master. The master, out of curiosity, provides a small space within his mind to house these curious thoughts. And that space grows, filling over time with bits and pieces of wisdom. One day, for one reason or another, the master starts to recognize the presence of this space. And it makes him feel uncomfortable and sad because he doesn't understand it. The master might even imagine himself to be infected. Then with more time, the master begins to put together the bits and pieces. And the master then sees the greater picture. He no longer feels infected, but fulfilled. He embraces these foreign emotions and lets them inundate him. In this flood of knowledge the foundation of old illusions on which the master's old feelings were constructed is washed away. The master becomes capable of seeing life for what it is. The master accepts and appreciates life's ups and downs. The master then relaxes with his personal decision to live life truthfully rather than to cling ignorantly to obvious illusions. The master is no longer a master, but an individual beyond categorization.
"Wherever you are today, don't forget to be yourself." Thank you Chris Guillebeau for your amazing words tonight. Such impeccable timing your blog posts always seem to have! Make your own category and own it. I'm in the process of figuring out my category. And man alive am I making mistakes! Thankfully I have people in my life who are no longer willing to wait around for me to keep making the same mistakes over and over again. I thank them for taking care of themselves, and I apologize for asking them to keep waiting around for me. I am also thankful for the people in my life that pick me back up after making mistakes. They too are important to me. They loan me their infinite wisdom to process my f***up moments.

Time to quit writing and experience the real world. I'm ready for a little personal growth yaaa!


Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Make mistakes now!

Failure is good when you learn from it.

My fear of 'failure' has kept me from being independent. Instead of falling down and learning how to stand back up, I opted to just not fall down alltogether. For many years I thought this made me better than the rest. My self esteem depended on it. Perhaps this is why my self esteem was so shaky all those years.

Now that I'm trying to do my own thing in life, I feel so ill-equipped. I can't remember all the things I thought I learned in grade school and I sound like the uneducated ass I do NOT want to be. Wait, I AM the uneducated ass I do not want to be! I used to learn things with the goal of getting a pretty little letter of praise from the school officials telling my family what a wonderful person I was because my grades were better than the average joe. Whoopiefriggindoodle! Those numbers are so impersonal and meaningless to me now. Now I want to learn for myself. Now I want to learn because I have worthy goals for which to use my knowledge. I am no longer scared of a failing grade. Well, that's a lie. I am still a little averse to that icky letter F. But now I am able to accept that F in all its F'ing glory (hah sorry) and learn from it. I want to create knowledge, not just reuse it!

And another point. My 4.0s and steady stream of gold stars throughout grade school set unrealistic standards and expectations for other students. I think our grading system is so skewed now. The common view is that if our students aren't passing with straight As, then surely our teachers aren't doing a good enough job. So now teachers are pressured to pass out As like free candy. And that is an issue because our standards have lowered.
And the kids who failed all their classes? Complete failures, right? Well it seems as though that's what our education system would have them believe. Their self-esteem is lowered to the point that they literally have no reason to care anymore, and I can't blame them. Once their grades get so low it really can appear pointless to keep trying in a broken system that is not well-adapted to their needs. The systems of our society so violently shove these youths down the ladder and make it exceedingly difficult to climb back up to the top! Or at least society's idea of 'the top.'
But what kills me most is that many of these kids are so much more gifted than many of the golden children with their beautiful 4.0 gpas. These children know what it means to fail, and they figured it out early on in life. Now would it not be beneficial to support these 'failures' and offer them other methods for achieving their goals? And I don't mean, 'hey, sonny there's a community college you can go to. It's your only option since you F'ed up.' There is such a BS social stigma attached to that. Like if you don't spend obscene amounts of money for your 4-year degree then you are clearly not an educated individual or something. Bull. Shit. I sit everyday in my classes with a bunch of blind bats paying obscene amounts of money to sit in classes they hate so they can get a fancy degree and make their parents proud. They aren't learning anything that they enjoy, and they are NOT benefitting our society as a whole. Instead their scholarship money is being wasted when kids paying for community college out of their own wallets could be using it to achieve something worthwhile.

Let's get our heads in the game. Let's enjoy our lives. Let's enjoy learning. And let's do these things for our own selves. I quit playing into the system. I give up. I have some dreams and I want to achieve them. I am going to ask questions in my classes. And I'm not going to dumb myself down so I can feel like I fit in with a group of dweebuses. I'm not a dweebus. I finally learned to have a little respect for myself, and I'm going to exercise my right to take care of myself. YOU ARE INTELLIGENT! YOU ARE WISE! YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL! YOU ARE YOU! OWN IT! Feel free to make mistakes. Learn from those mistakes. And then go kick some life ass with those learned lessons.