As most of you know I'm typically skeptical of self help anything. When I see self help books I chuckle at them and youtube channels are no exception either. The reason that the idea of self help gets me so heated is because I believe the only way to really help yourself is to search within yourself. I believe that the only person who can create happiness for you or do whats right for yourself is ultimately you. No persons advice or idea of what happiness and what do for yourself can really define what actions will make you happy. As much as I want to admit I have never read a self help book or watched a youtube channel I can not lie. Recently, I have watched self help channels on weight loss, inspiration, loss, and the like. I suppose what sparked this interest in self help is the idea of narratives behind such topics. After meeting with Professor Kellas and being enlightened on what narrative work is I find myself intrigued by any sort of narrative. Story telling does define who we are. Our stories bring forth a piece of ourselves.
Antishay (I believe this is her username on youtube) described how she always had these coping mechanisms to make herself appear as though she was strong and confident. That she wasn't always being true to herself and often she only had this conception of herself being strong and confident to suppress the vulnerability that existed within herself. When I really thought about the words she was using and explaining how she coped with shopping, food, drinking, and a lust for love I realized that I am similar to her. People see me as a strong individual who is a hard worker. Somebody who laughs in the face of struggle and combats with all force. I do fight and I do believe that I am strong, but I am also venerable. I cry when I write, because of the broken heart I am attempting to heal. I have had this broken heart for years and it has caused me to be a miserable person. If people really see the person I am inside they would not think I was the strong person that I mask myself to be. Goffman believes that we mask ourselves so much that we forget the people we are internally. I believe this is true in many circumstances and especially in mine.
Why do I care? Today I updated my status on how kind deeds seem to get me nowhere that being overtly nice actually left me less appreciated, but why should this matter? Should it not just be for the kindness in itself that makes me satisfied? Why am I searching for acceptance and love from acts of kindness? Have I become the selfish person that I feared so? I now know what I have been doing this entire time. Shopping and buying people things in order to get them to love me. I can not buy love. I can not expect someone to love me because I will do anything for them. They need to love me for the person I am inside not for the person I attempt to perceive myself as. I do not need romantic love to be happy, but I need self satisfaction. I need to allow myself to be vulnerable with others and I need to work on my soothing mechanisms. I shop because I care so much about my beauty. I have countless amounts of clothing, make up, and even cutesy things to decorate my room. My closest and drawers are full of materials that really are not necessary. Once I run out of what I need I will consume more product, but right now I have an excess of product exposing my need to fill a void within myself. Food has always been an issue for me. I struggled with my weight my entire life. When I lost nearly 100 lbs after high school I gave excuses to stay at the same weight. I'd workout, but wouldn't eat properly or eat properly and not workout. There needs to be a healthy combination of both and I need to be serious about this. My friends notice this correlation with me and dating. It's not difficult for me to find someone and this becomes a problem. I jump into relationships, rush them, don't enjoy being with myself. When we enter a relationship we have to put effort into not only ourselves, but the other person. I desire love so much that I would sacrifice parts of myself in order for them to be happy or what I believe will make them happy. I put up with abusive behaviors and become extremely needy. I believe my desire to have someone stems from my need to feel accepted. I always want to be perfect, the best person that I can be. I can't be the best person I am if I can't be happy alone with myself.
Instead of being depressed about being single again I am actually kind of happy it happened. My guy friends have been attempting to "get" me since I have become single. I have denied instead of jumping and I could not be any more proud of myself. I am taking this situation and looking back at all I've done wrong and what I need to be happy in the future. I need to work on myself and learn to be happy alone for a while. I can't lie to myself and convince myself that I am happy in a relationship. I can't force love or force someone else to love me. When love is meant to come it will and I will know that the person is right for me. Right now I'm not sure any of my prospects are right for me and honestly I want to focus on me. My mother is ill, I have goals I want to accomplish, and I may even be leaving this state within the next year. Traveling to San Fran also helped me realize a lot of this. My conversations were surrounded by the same old things, but when I talked research or talked about interests that I had I felt so much more alive. Instead of going to my room and crying myself to sleep I went out with friends and enjoyed my young life.
I realize that I substitute a lot in order to give off this radiance of happiness that doesn't quite exist within my life. I now am cognizant of the fact that I need to make changes in my life in order to be the happy person I have convinced myself that I am. We have to believe that we are capable of altering our lives when we see problems that have arose and stick with these goals we set for ourselves. There is only so long you can mask yourself before you become invisible to being the person you really are beneath the mask. I'm ready to be me. Below I have listed a bunch of goals for myself and I intend to complete them. There is no set time line just a acknowledgment that they will be completed and trusting myself in that.
1. My room has been a disaster zone for far too long. I do work two jobs and am a full time student, but when we live in a mess our lives become a mess. I have way too many material possessions and have too many excuses for why I can't clean it. The real reason is I'm too busy on my little social networking site and push important things. So it is my intention to go through this entire room. Donate some possessions to good will, and just keep it neat. Organization is important to having an organized life and I believe this will be the first step to getting where I need to be.
2. Writing is a huge part of who I am and has shaped me in many ways. It has been my release and it has been my strength. When I felt alone and as though nobody else could understand me I have written for clarity. I have since lost the desire to write in the same way that I once did and realize that this is problematic. I am in the process of revamping parts of my thesis and am loving the process. I had forgotten my deep passion for writing and know now that I must DO instead of SAY. I often say that I can write and finish novels, research, etc..., but I never DO. I am determined to complete lots of work this year and write thousands of wonderful pages. Not just mediocre work either actually fundamentally relative and beautiful work.
3. Shopping is something I never think of as a problem, but now that I see my bank account and all of the silly things I have I realize how detrimental my shopping habits have been. I should be focused on paying off my debts and being debt free yet I feel compelled to buy shiny pretty things. It's okay to shop every once in a while, but I realize that I have overstocked on things I just don't need. I am not to buy any lotions, candles, cloths, shoes, or trinkets until I have beaten all of the things I have bought to death and they are no longer plausible to keep and can be donated.
4. Being single. This one may seem trivial, but unless I find someone who completely wows me and I feel is the right person to make me happy and is on the same page as me I intend to stay single. Being single is not as terrible as people make it to be. I don't need attention nor do I need to be committed to anything except for my work in goals in life. When it's right for me to be with somebody I will know, but for now I have let go on that desire for love and questioning whether I am good enough. I am good enough I just need to find somebody who is good enough for me and that doesn't happen overnight. I'm prepared to wait and in the mean time I need to get my life on track and be where I want to be. If I'm not satisified with my life I can't possibly make another person happy.
5. Weight loss. I have struggled for this for so long and in this last year I have gotten so overweight. I could blame it on eating meat again and allowing myself to indulge in fast food. I could blame it on the fact that my most recent boyfriend never made me feel as though I was fat or not good enough. I can't blame anyone but myself ultimately. If I wanted to be thin I would be thin. I know I have what it takes to lose lots of weight (I've already done it once), but I need to do it healthy and work at it. I can't lose the 50 lbs I'd like to lose overnight. It could take a year or two from now before I get to my goal weight, but I know I need to set that and work at it. I'm pretty good about exercise (up until my recent injury), but I need to try to get there everyday even if it's pilates for 20 minutes. Any little bit is better than nothing.
6. Learning how to be nice and respect people. Sometimes I get caught up in my own selfish ways and want more than anything to be paid attention to. I allow people's unkind words to get me to me more than they should and I realize that if someone wants to treat me unkindly then that is their decisions. I need to be happy with myself enough to be able to see that they are wrong. I need to stop being so concerned with being judged because the people who are worth my time are the people who are going to accept me for who I am. If I put as much effort as I do feeling bad about others words into helping friends and others then I would be so much better off and happier. Helping others is truly my passion in life and I need to focus all the negative on that.
7. Learning to live the way that I want to live and not listening to others. I listen to my parents so much that I often limit myself as far as things I want to do in life. I will stay in because I feel obligated to be a good daughter, but I also need to balance my social life with pleasing my parents as well. I'm a busy girl, but I also need to live. Traveling has given me a new idea of what living is. Experiencing things that I can no experience on a day to day basis. The ability to see different cultures and get a better understanding of the world that I am living in. There is more than just Chicago Illinois and I'm starting to see how much more is out there for me to see.
Those are the basic things that I'm wanting to alter right now in my life. I also feel that I need to be more confident in my intelligence and where I am in my life. I have to be okay with failing because it's not really failing. Failing is for people who learn nothing from their experiences in life. Every experience has shaped me into the person that I am. I am grateful for all of the pain, happiness, sadness, joy, and confusion that has occurred in my life. I love all of the people who have come into my life because they came for a reason. They taught me something about myself I would have never learned otherwise whether the outcome was a good or bad one. I can not even begin to express how wonderful it feels to finally think about life in this fashion. We can't live in failure and constant self pity. The past is the past it is just a memory of nothingness. It has come and taught us what was needed and is gone and never to return. Our future is what we would like of ourselves, but we can't predict it. We can't live in the future or the past we have to live in the present. The present is all we can be certain of. We will make mistakes, we will grow, we will fall, but we need to keep going and keep living for everyday. Not everyday will be perfect, but not everyday will be miserable either. We can shape our lives into what we want them to be and nobody can ever rob us of that. We can be who we want to be I know who I want to be and I am going to work very hard at being that person. I trust in the lords plan for me and I believe that all I have done in my life will not be forgotten. My heart and head are in the right place and I am prepared to make changes in order to improve that.
<3 always,
Conceptual Lexy
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