I have spent most of my life loathing who I am mainly because I am analytical and seemed wired for just looking at every thing that isn't quite the way it should be including myself. Order has always been a destination for me. If I can just get things in order I will be ready to tackle the big stuff.
I can sit down in a clean organized space materially and really get something done. At least this is what my more intense OCD part of me would like to believe but it is just not true. This kind of order doesn't exist in this world. I did visit a garage recently that looked like an operating room. You can have the illusion of order but it takes a lot of time and money and doesn't make you happy.
On the spiritual front I think it is another form of control. It is acceptable and everyone would like to be that neat and orderly but life is messy even if you can eat on your garage floor.
The spouse of the garage owner is a very angry person it felt oppressive to be in their home. It was beautifully decorated and everything was perfect but there was an elephant in the room. This is when I wish I hadn't taken the red pill like in the Matrix movie. I can see the pain in others so clearly and wish sometimes that I didn't. In the past I would try to help but people have to find their own way out. Sometime it has to be a lot of pain to make you move forward.
I have always been able to see the pain in others. Even as a child I remember questioning the behaviors of others and wondering why they were so unhappy. Seeing just so clearly their suffering and asking questions that got me in a lot of trouble. My daddy called it the spirit of discernment.
We all feel trapped in our lives and our pain from time to time. We really think that we have no choices when it is that we are not ready for the consequences of the choices we need to make. Staying too long in a marriage or a job. Living with a controlling verbally abusive person who knows your fears and uses words to keep you from having the courage to move on. This situation can make you think you have no choice. That was my first marriage.
In my second marriage it was the opposite but sometimes just as painful. I lived with someone that didn't even see me. As long as I did everything to make things run smoothly and didn't change one thing then it was great. The truth was I was happy to be invisible left alone to entertain myself I was comfortable in that role. It was the opposite of my relationship the the explosive alcoholic and my childhood. In both cases I knew I was less likely to get in trouble if I was invisible.
I stayed because I imagined that there wasn't anything better and weeks turn into months and months turned into years and I felt like I had invested too much time to leave. Besides what did I have to complain about ? I felt safe and I was use to the pain so I just stayed busy to avoid thinking about it. I was happy that someone would have me and worried that I would end up alone. It felt great compared to my last relationship even if I felt alone most of the time.
Of course I blamed myself for the choices I made but that doesn't help. I made the choices I made because of where I was at that moment in my life. I made that choice because I hadn't grown spiritually enough to see that I was repeating the past. I married my daddy the second time.
A kind peaceful man that emotionally wasn't there ever. He only got attached to his wives and his religion nothing else existed. He had great wisdom to offer strangers but if you were related to him you had to accept that he wasn't capable of really seeing you. I loved him so much and before my mother died we were inseparable. When my stepmother came alone I no longer existed.
I guess my point is that we make the choices we make for a reason. I think it is mostly because the person or the situation seems familiar. Even if I hadn't married my father the second time it would have been someone that would have been similar. That relationship felt good for a long time and I got to understand what it would be like to be my mother.
I am not sure how I got here today in the post but I can feel a little healing for myself. I am like my daddy in many ways. Offering hopefully good advice to strangers. He fell in love with my mother and her religion. He told me once that when he went to that first prayer meeting that he knew it was what he had been looking for all his life. I figured he was attracted to the emotional freedom of the Pentecostal church. He grew up in a home where no one was allowed to have feelings except his abusive father. The kids stayed silent at all cost.
We all have things to understand about ourselves and the choices we have made. We can't believe there is anything really wrong with us. It important to find out what thoughts we have about ourselves that keep stuck and hurting ourselves. I am at a place where I know what thoughts have caused me pain and I just want to be happy.
I have reached the end of my spiritual quest. I am glad I have stopped thinking I need to change to be happy I just need to enjoy today and my freedom from not being enough.
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Making a decision - Stuck - Fantasy
I sometimes wonder if what I am writing here is doing anyone any good at this point. I started writing this blog when it felt like the only way for me to stay alive. I mean that in a literal sense. Every word that came out of me helped me to endure just one more day of the emotional excruciating pain I was experiencing at the time. In my mind my life had been reduced to ashes and I was starting over again and I resisted with every fiber of my being.
Because of my resistance I stayed stuck for a long time. I also believed this made my body react by rejecting health and my adrenals failed and my thyroid stopped working. I was thin and refused to go to the doctor. In my emotionally and mentally weakened state I wasn't sure there was a solution to my problem or if living was really for me. I kept going despite what my mind was telling me.
I tried to do the things that worked for me when I was left at 30 by the man of my dreams. Ironically last night I dream about him I was lost in a strange city and the only phone number I had in my phone was his and I called him to come and get me. He never said yes before we got disconnected. He is still not there I guess. In my pain it felt hollow to repeat the things that I had done before I was more spiritually mature and it seemed obvious that all the work I had done on myself didn't keep bad things form happening to me.
The first time I thought I could mold myself into a pillar of spiritual strength and attract only goodness in my life and it worked for awhile anyway but in the end I still wasn't good enough and was left again. I couldn't reconcile the fact I was exactly where I was before. This conflict cause me to stay stuck for what seemed forever.
What I would say to the broken person I was then is that crap happens to everyone and there is no magic bullet to stop it. You can only do so much and then you got to just live and be happy being who you are. We get trapped in the idea of working on ourselves forever when it is suppose to free us to accept ourselves and just live.
I feel feel whole now for the first time in my life. I am thinking about what am I going to do with the rest of my life. I do want to live deliberately for a change deciding how I want to spend my time instead of just riding things out and waiting for something to happen.
Yesterday I spent 2 1/2 hours on the phone with my sister using face time for the first time. It was nice we showed each other our planted flowers in the yard. She has a lot things in her world that she can't do anything about right now. You can't really solve other people's problems they have to be ready to receive help. I am an excellent example of that. She isn't ready to hear that.
We get entrenched in our version of life and only when we are ready to admit that it isn't working can we move on. We don't want other people poking holes in our fantasy version of life. Only when the pain becomes too much do we start looking for an answer. Our mind says "I can't do this anymore".
I have had a great journey here with this blog and I haven't decided to quit writing yet but I feel this is coming to an end for me. It seems I am getting mostly traffic from some porn site in Italy so it doesn't feel that I am making a difference. Until next time.
Because of my resistance I stayed stuck for a long time. I also believed this made my body react by rejecting health and my adrenals failed and my thyroid stopped working. I was thin and refused to go to the doctor. In my emotionally and mentally weakened state I wasn't sure there was a solution to my problem or if living was really for me. I kept going despite what my mind was telling me.
I tried to do the things that worked for me when I was left at 30 by the man of my dreams. Ironically last night I dream about him I was lost in a strange city and the only phone number I had in my phone was his and I called him to come and get me. He never said yes before we got disconnected. He is still not there I guess. In my pain it felt hollow to repeat the things that I had done before I was more spiritually mature and it seemed obvious that all the work I had done on myself didn't keep bad things form happening to me.
The first time I thought I could mold myself into a pillar of spiritual strength and attract only goodness in my life and it worked for awhile anyway but in the end I still wasn't good enough and was left again. I couldn't reconcile the fact I was exactly where I was before. This conflict cause me to stay stuck for what seemed forever.
What I would say to the broken person I was then is that crap happens to everyone and there is no magic bullet to stop it. You can only do so much and then you got to just live and be happy being who you are. We get trapped in the idea of working on ourselves forever when it is suppose to free us to accept ourselves and just live.
I feel feel whole now for the first time in my life. I am thinking about what am I going to do with the rest of my life. I do want to live deliberately for a change deciding how I want to spend my time instead of just riding things out and waiting for something to happen.
Yesterday I spent 2 1/2 hours on the phone with my sister using face time for the first time. It was nice we showed each other our planted flowers in the yard. She has a lot things in her world that she can't do anything about right now. You can't really solve other people's problems they have to be ready to receive help. I am an excellent example of that. She isn't ready to hear that.
We get entrenched in our version of life and only when we are ready to admit that it isn't working can we move on. We don't want other people poking holes in our fantasy version of life. Only when the pain becomes too much do we start looking for an answer. Our mind says "I can't do this anymore".
I have had a great journey here with this blog and I haven't decided to quit writing yet but I feel this is coming to an end for me. It seems I am getting mostly traffic from some porn site in Italy so it doesn't feel that I am making a difference. Until next time.
Sunday, June 9, 2019
Parents Wedding Facing the truth
I am spending the weekend alone which isn't such a shock but this weekend I am not particularly inspired to do anything. I did pull weeds yesterday morning but that is about the only routine thing I have done. I usually have a least a to do list my head but I decided to just do nothing.
This isn't something I am at all comfortable doing and lets just say that my idea of doing nothing can sometimes translate into another persons doing a lot. I talked to my sister for a couple of hours yesterday while she fixed herself lunch and then walked to the bottom of her property and pulled weeds while we talked. Our friendship is growing as she realizes we are more the same then she imagined.
Today I got up and decided to clean my home office and move towards changing it into a studio. I don't really like this room and when I bring work home I sit at the dining room table. The office is paneled at the bottom and has a large bookcase a perfect set up for a working space. It is northeast facing and seems dark and uninviting. I painted it a saturated blue to contrast with the dark paneling but it made it worse. I do write my blog here but that is really it.
To start the cleaning process I first took the two last boxes of my old business files upstairs. When I got there I faced a bed covered with family photos. A few months ago I started looking at mostly my mothers family photos and got too overwhelmed and left it. Today I decided to put them away and move on and then I stumbled upon my parents wedding album. It is the original with thick white pages with plastic on both sides of each page. It has no cover or order and some of the plastic has cracked.
This album used to be kept in the bottom drawer of my mothers secretary. As a child I loved to pull it out regularly and look at my parents getting married. I have often thought of creating a new album but this one has a smell that reminds me of my childhood. Probably off gases of the plastic they used back then but I could bear to get rid of the original album.
Today I brought it downstairs and started scanning the pictures. I want to make a digital photo album for my sister. Along with the wedding the album has all the professional pictures of our family. Ones with Santa and a few during a time when my mom bought one of those packages from Olan Mills. I have added a few random photos I have found over the years.
My mother had dreams for herself and for us. She made every moment count with her entrepreneur spirit she made our lives feel full and safe. She kept us motivated and everything at our house was organized and drama free. Her own family growing up was plagued with addiction and lived drama to drama this sometimes invaded our lives with phone calls in the middle of the night. She always downplayed the situation and everything went back to normal.
Looking at my little family today starting with my mothers late teenage years. She was at a dinner getting and award for vocational leadership to the last professional family picture just before she got sick. Her smile from the first picture change from genuine to fake to even forced in the last one. She gave up her own ambitions mostly at the direction of the church. It was a choice she made and certainly had nothing to do with my father who would have joined the circus to be with her.
Her mother and the indoctrination she received from her church kept her on the straight and narrow. She chose that path and lived it with her whole heart and would not be happy about me writing this. We make choices based on what we know and who is influencing us day to day. My dad raised a Methodist loved the rigidity of my mothers religion. He didn't like to make decisions for himself so it was great to have the church do this for him.
Looking at all the pictures together has helped me to see the bigger picture and where I come from. I can see where everything is a choice and how I can choose again. My mother didn't choose to get sick but I think she lived against who she really was and that can make you sick. I only remember her wanting to get well for my father. Anything treatment he found she would try. In the end because she had to have faith she couldn't be honest with us girls that she wasn't going to make it.
I am glad my sister and I are getting closer. We have been alone most of our lives emotionally and spiritually with only our faith to get us through. I am grateful for my family history and the values both my parents gave to me. It has served me well.
This isn't something I am at all comfortable doing and lets just say that my idea of doing nothing can sometimes translate into another persons doing a lot. I talked to my sister for a couple of hours yesterday while she fixed herself lunch and then walked to the bottom of her property and pulled weeds while we talked. Our friendship is growing as she realizes we are more the same then she imagined.
Today I got up and decided to clean my home office and move towards changing it into a studio. I don't really like this room and when I bring work home I sit at the dining room table. The office is paneled at the bottom and has a large bookcase a perfect set up for a working space. It is northeast facing and seems dark and uninviting. I painted it a saturated blue to contrast with the dark paneling but it made it worse. I do write my blog here but that is really it.
To start the cleaning process I first took the two last boxes of my old business files upstairs. When I got there I faced a bed covered with family photos. A few months ago I started looking at mostly my mothers family photos and got too overwhelmed and left it. Today I decided to put them away and move on and then I stumbled upon my parents wedding album. It is the original with thick white pages with plastic on both sides of each page. It has no cover or order and some of the plastic has cracked.
This album used to be kept in the bottom drawer of my mothers secretary. As a child I loved to pull it out regularly and look at my parents getting married. I have often thought of creating a new album but this one has a smell that reminds me of my childhood. Probably off gases of the plastic they used back then but I could bear to get rid of the original album.
Today I brought it downstairs and started scanning the pictures. I want to make a digital photo album for my sister. Along with the wedding the album has all the professional pictures of our family. Ones with Santa and a few during a time when my mom bought one of those packages from Olan Mills. I have added a few random photos I have found over the years.
My mother had dreams for herself and for us. She made every moment count with her entrepreneur spirit she made our lives feel full and safe. She kept us motivated and everything at our house was organized and drama free. Her own family growing up was plagued with addiction and lived drama to drama this sometimes invaded our lives with phone calls in the middle of the night. She always downplayed the situation and everything went back to normal.
Looking at my little family today starting with my mothers late teenage years. She was at a dinner getting and award for vocational leadership to the last professional family picture just before she got sick. Her smile from the first picture change from genuine to fake to even forced in the last one. She gave up her own ambitions mostly at the direction of the church. It was a choice she made and certainly had nothing to do with my father who would have joined the circus to be with her.
Her mother and the indoctrination she received from her church kept her on the straight and narrow. She chose that path and lived it with her whole heart and would not be happy about me writing this. We make choices based on what we know and who is influencing us day to day. My dad raised a Methodist loved the rigidity of my mothers religion. He didn't like to make decisions for himself so it was great to have the church do this for him.
Looking at all the pictures together has helped me to see the bigger picture and where I come from. I can see where everything is a choice and how I can choose again. My mother didn't choose to get sick but I think she lived against who she really was and that can make you sick. I only remember her wanting to get well for my father. Anything treatment he found she would try. In the end because she had to have faith she couldn't be honest with us girls that she wasn't going to make it.
I am glad my sister and I are getting closer. We have been alone most of our lives emotionally and spiritually with only our faith to get us through. I am grateful for my family history and the values both my parents gave to me. It has served me well.
Sunday, June 2, 2019
Spiritual Genetics - Self Acceptance
I had a marathon conversation with my sister this week. She called at 9:30 and we talked until 12:30. I wasn't expecting this and had to be at work at 8:30 the next morning but took it all in stride. I am happy that we are really starting to get to know each other.
My sister like me has spent most of her life alone emotionally. She feels she has a leg up on me because she has children but now that they are grown they are starting to see that we are not normal. There is a number of reasons for that first with our Pentecostal upbringing we were taught that the things of this world are not important. If you have talents and abilities then you use them for God's good and to encourage people to find Jesus.
We are analytical and our minds are in a constant state of processing and we aren't really interested in small talk or the latest TV super show. My sister has stayed close to our family faith and pretty isolated to what is going on in the world. My brother in law keeps Fox News running constantly on the TV so that gives you an idea of the slant of the house. Everything points to the end of time.
I once said something about Tony Robbins to my sister and she had no idea who that was. I think it is funny that after such different lives we do have a lot of spiritual ideas in common. I talked to her about the spiritual books I have read and she comes back with a christian book that says the same thing.
We haven't been close all these years. She has called me regularly most of my life but usually she did most of the talking. She is having an awakening now with her kids wishing she was more like other people. She wants to withdraw from their lives because she doesn't measure up in their eyes.
I told her that we are who we are and that there is nothing wrong with us. Our mother gave us the gift of individualism and knowing what is important. We were born in the deep end of the pool and the sooner we accept ourselves the happier we will be.
I have always wished to be like other the people but I am not. I have finally come to terms with just living and enjoying who I am. I did tell her that loving herself will make her feel less like a victim. The kids will come around one day and see that she has dedicated her life to making them strong individuals. They want to fit in right now and they are not sure what to do with mom the spiritual intellectual.
I was happy when she told me that during a recent family get together she was able to take a walk and enjoy the spectacular scenery. She said it was the first time she didn't try to be something she wasn't.
We can't get away from who we are at the core. My sister is an amazing person and has done a lot with her life despite a lot of road blocks and a rough start. I think it is funny how much the same we are and how only now she can see that. Spiritual genetic I guess. Thanks Mom.
My sister like me has spent most of her life alone emotionally. She feels she has a leg up on me because she has children but now that they are grown they are starting to see that we are not normal. There is a number of reasons for that first with our Pentecostal upbringing we were taught that the things of this world are not important. If you have talents and abilities then you use them for God's good and to encourage people to find Jesus.
We are analytical and our minds are in a constant state of processing and we aren't really interested in small talk or the latest TV super show. My sister has stayed close to our family faith and pretty isolated to what is going on in the world. My brother in law keeps Fox News running constantly on the TV so that gives you an idea of the slant of the house. Everything points to the end of time.
I once said something about Tony Robbins to my sister and she had no idea who that was. I think it is funny that after such different lives we do have a lot of spiritual ideas in common. I talked to her about the spiritual books I have read and she comes back with a christian book that says the same thing.
We haven't been close all these years. She has called me regularly most of my life but usually she did most of the talking. She is having an awakening now with her kids wishing she was more like other people. She wants to withdraw from their lives because she doesn't measure up in their eyes.
I told her that we are who we are and that there is nothing wrong with us. Our mother gave us the gift of individualism and knowing what is important. We were born in the deep end of the pool and the sooner we accept ourselves the happier we will be.
I have always wished to be like other the people but I am not. I have finally come to terms with just living and enjoying who I am. I did tell her that loving herself will make her feel less like a victim. The kids will come around one day and see that she has dedicated her life to making them strong individuals. They want to fit in right now and they are not sure what to do with mom the spiritual intellectual.
I was happy when she told me that during a recent family get together she was able to take a walk and enjoy the spectacular scenery. She said it was the first time she didn't try to be something she wasn't.
We can't get away from who we are at the core. My sister is an amazing person and has done a lot with her life despite a lot of road blocks and a rough start. I think it is funny how much the same we are and how only now she can see that. Spiritual genetic I guess. Thanks Mom.
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